Got an external hard drive, how can I make my mac faster?

So I finally got an external hard drive, hoping to make my mac faster. So I went on and shifted everything in all the files (not Library) in /Users/~ and I noticed a slight increase in speed. However, in /~/Library, there is Application Support and other big files that might be taking up a lot of memory on my internal hard drive, but I am worried that if I move them, the applications might stop working. Basically, I am asking how can I move the whole application to the external hard drive, rather than just the shortcut/package, so that it runs of the external hard drive.

I am a (Microsoft Windows) user, but I think that it still applies to Mac Computers, and that is you Can't move the installed softwares files from the internal hard drive into an external hard drive.

Just moving big files from your internal harddrive to an external wont really make your computer faster, especially with a Mac.
On Windows, it may make a slight difference if your drive is very fragmented, because then it has less data to sift through when looking for files, but the filesystem used by OS X can't be fragmented (because it doesn't just put data where the HDD arm is, it puts it where it wont be fragmented).

To answer your question, you can move most of the app to your external drive just by copying the .app file from your Applications folder. To move the file data, you can move the whole Application Support folder to your external drive and then make a symlink to that folder in the directory it was in before. See this link for more info about symlinks:
http://gigaom.com/apple/how-to-create-and-use-symlinks-on-a-mac/

If you have a huge iTunes/iPhoto library like I did, I'd recommend moving them to your external drive and in each program you can point to where the files are now placed. But between the two apps I had over 100GB of files, so it made a big difference.
Only downside is that you'll have to have that drive plugged in when you want to access the files in each program but for me it isn't an issue. But it was a big difference for me. Between that and clearing up other files, I went from about 40 GB free to about 190 free (out of 320GB).
Maybe I just had it too bogged down, lol.

However, I see in your sig that you have an iMac with a large drive anyways so it may not make much of a difference. Clean out any Applications you don't need and maybe upgrade the RAM, shouldn't be more than $50 for 8GB..

That's what sped my iMac up a lot. Upgraded from 4GB to 12GB and never have slowdowns anymore. Though, it was cause I use Parallels which uses pretty much all of the 4GB.

I don't really want to have to upgrade any RAM. I just want to get near enough to the original speeds it would run at.

In that case, I think your best bet would be to back up your important files and reinstall the OS. If it's that slow, it may just be bogged down..

Videos and Pictures bog it down really badly. I suggest you move your videos, photos, and your music collection to the drive. Then see if you can keep files you know you need on your Mac. I'll be doing that in a week once I get my SSD drive and a backup drive.

In general, you can boost a Mac's performance by over 200% by turning off things such as the magnification effect, genie effect, and stuff like that, but I don't do it because I like the eye-candy.

I recommend this:

And watch this :

I can run some apps from an external 500gb drive, but some refuse to run. Most do, though. Even a 3.2 gig CAD program will run from an ext drive I just move large apps and games to there since my MBA iS only 64gb haha

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How can I move all the folders in ~/Library to my hard drive so that my Applications run smoothly?