Booting off external drives and suchlike

I hope this is the right subforum.

I have a four year old Macbook Pro that basically is used only when I have to travel. It's in good shape and for what I use it for, mainly word processing, email, web surfing, watching movies I've loaded onto it, et cetera, it seems to serve its purpose well. It only has a 200 gig hard drive, though, and there are some activities I'd like to use it for that will eat up most of the remaining hard drive space.

So, I'm thinking of either opening it up and replacing the hard drive in there with a 500 or 750 gig hard drive or leaving the machine alone and buying a portable hard drive.

Questions:

1. Will the OS and hardware allow the laptop to be booted off the external hard drive if I want it to be? I'm thinking of BootCamp

2. I'm thinking I might install VMWare Fusion on that external drive, if not BootCamp. Would I install BootCamp on the main drive inside the laptop or install it on the external drive?

3. Does it matter if the external drive is hooked up via USB2 or Firewire in terms of anything but speed?


These seemed like OS questions to me.

Thanks for the advice.

 

Thanks. I'd really like to get a solid answer for whether I can Windoze 7 on the external drive via either VMWare Fusion or Bootcamp. My wife travels with me sometimes and her office requires all sorts of Windows-specific security and such to log in to her servers if she wants more than emails. Right now, everything works via the laptop through Fusion, but I'd like to move that off the laptop's HD. I'd prefer not to spend more money on a four year old laptop by taking out the existing HD...that's why I wanted the external.

Good advice on the Firewire 800...I forgot the laptop had that port.