Is it possible to install Windows Vista to a USB external drive? I'm just wanting to play World of Warcraft, and it plays kinda cruddy in Linux, so I'm wondering if there would be any kind of performance drop by putting in on a USB drive, and whether it would overwrite the GRUB that is on my internal hard drive.

Note: There are 2 reasons I'm going for Vista instead of XP:
1) The Intel video drivers crash for some reason every now and then in WoW, and in XP I get a BSOD followed by a forced restart, in Vista, the screen just goes black for a second and the driver restarts.

2) It's very hard to track down drivers for all my devices cause' this system shipped with Vista.

Yes it is Possible.

I know there are many different ways. If i have a System which runs Linux on it i will just simply remove that disc for the installation on the external disc (you never know if windows is killing your bootsectors).

After your finished with installing windows on the external one you can now just simply boot the specific disc and windows/linux will load up.

I can not say does having windows on the external is a good solution.
The Performance will totally kill you!

ANyway good luck!

Well all I really want to use it for is World of Warcraft, and I have 2.5 GBs of RAM, so a lot of stuff can be stored in my RAM. I just want to be able to play WoW at full speed and quality, and I don't see that happening in Linux any time soon without spending a fortune on a beast of a machine.

Did you already try it with Wine? I just know does for example Diablo II works more than good! Even trough the Graphics Re-Rendering it creates better graphics for it than windows ever will provide!

But for sure you can install vista ona external... just make sure you select the right drive when you install it! And maybe take your Linux HD out for the installing process... otherwise it will override your bootloader!

:-)

My concern here wouldn't even be the speed Vista runs (which i think would be pretty crumby) but instead WoW relies quite a bit on HD read speed. (From experience, I have been stuck on Zep or Boats because my system took too long to load new area) I'm interested to see how well this works out for you.

Running WoW on Linux wine wiki..
http://www.wowwiki.com/Wine

I would think running Vista/WoW from an external USB HD would incur a pretty hefty performance penalty..
I think WoW would perform better in wine on Linux, that from that external drive.