Greetings:

I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop with a Vista Home Basic Operating System. The laptop works great and I have no problems surfing the web with it while on a wireless network. However, I have an external hard drive (1 Terabyte) plugged into my laptop, USB powered. This external hard disk is increasingly giving me problems. Every time, I visit the folders on this external hard disk, everything on my laptop freezes even my downloads. I am forced to wait until my OS catches up with my commands and carries them out. I start getting responses like "Expansion Drive F: (my external hard drive) (not responding)" and "Mozilla Firefox (not responding). Even a MSWord document I am working on will be become "frozen" during this time. This OS "freeze-up" is very frustrating. Can I do anything to rectify this situation? Some factors have been wondering about are the following:

a) In terms of memory, the external hard disk has far more than my laptop. Could this be the source of the stoppages?

b) When I visit my external hard drive, files are being actively being downloaded to it. Could this be the source of the stoppages?

In the past, I have used this same external hard drive attached to a desktop with XP (SP3) and didn't have any problems what-so-ever with the OS or the hard drive. Any advice given is greatly appreciated.