Windows 8.1 question

I recently bought a new laptop, but it only a 500GB hard drive. It does however have an SD card slot. Can insert an SD card into it and run software off it?

It depends on the software but generally, no, they won't support this, and don't do this anyway, a lot of software will want to put stuff in the registry and/or the default OS Drive program files.

It really can end up causing a big problem installing software onto alternative drives because quite a lot of software isn't designed to handle this situation properly.

Most Windows programs have to be installed properly and part of this process is saying where you want the files to be stored. You could easily point it at the SD card.

Having said that a 500Gb hard disk is pretty big and will store a vast number of files. For speed and ease of use you would probably be better installing all your software to the hard disc. For most people the software does not actually take up a vast amount of space anyway.

Use the SD card for backing up and archiving data files. This will have the advantage that when one card is full you can simply use another and this will have no effect on the working of your machine.