working off external hard drive

Just got a Canon HV20, and ordered VMSP9. My laptop's hard drive is nearly full, so I have a 250 gig external hard drive hooked up via USB. Can I download the Vegas program to the external drive and, via firewire, transfer my HV20 HD tapes to Vegas and edit/ burn DVD's without diffiuculty? I'm wondering if the USB interface will be a problem.
Thanks for any direction

You don't need to put the program onto the drive, just tell vegas to use the external drive for the files. I always record on external drive and just stick them on the shelf, or often, just leave them till they're full and add another. vegas, premiere and the others all do this as routine.

some info here (http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/879729)

It shouldn't be a problem. I have all of my raw video and project files on an external drive. The program itsself is on my internal hard drive though, I'm not sure how that will work out.

The program itself will need to be installed on the main drive. This is just to avoid future possible problems it just makes it a whole lot easier to have it installed on the main drive. Can you install it on the external? Yes, but it's not a wise choice because then to use the program you will need to plug in the external HDD. So if your internal is that full, copy over files to your external that doesn't absolutely need to be on the internal and install the program then.

But for project files, videos and stuff you use for Vegas, the external drive can be used. It's going to be slower than an internal drive I can tell you now since it's USB, but it will work. So you will probably see a lot of lagging going on when editing. This is why desktop computers are better for editing (multiple internal drives and they all work at the same speed), but since you have to live with what you have, you will have to deal with the slowness.

Vegas does NOT need to be installed on the main drive. I have a ton of software on my computer & install none of it on my main drive. (Makes it easier to switch if your boot drive goes down.)

I use USB drives for pretty much most of my stuff, including video editing - it's not a problem.