Re: It was just a little speaker problem on my Dell.
I use my external for backing up document files mainly and perhaps program installation files that I have downloaded.
Programs that you have a disk for and O/S files are replacable and don't really need to be backed up. The important things are the things you created and irreplacable unless backed up.
Not everyone agrees with this and some back up everything, but my opinion is that any hard drive that crashes probably had stuff on it that I don't want on my new hard drive.
The drive will come with instructions on how to do what you want to do.