Hard drive, backup, work flow help

Hi--
I need some help figuring out what to do....You can tell I have a little bit of knowledge but am now dangerous.
I have a Mac Book Pro with approx 111.47 GB full and 815 available. I have 250 external portable filled with my iphoto stuff. I know I need more space. I use my computer for graphic design so my file sizes are often quite high.
I work in my home office mostly.
I also like to work in my family room (wirelessly using ATT-Uverse 2wire) and think I have router to plug in via ethernet to other computers and my printer. It is a pain to drag the portable HD along so I don't always use it.
I need a solution to give me more HD space....
Should I upgrade my internal hard drive? How do I do this? What do I do with my data?
Do I buy another bigger external hard drive? Can I work wirelessly so I don't have to drag this everywhere?
I also have purchased timecapsule when it first came out, but have no idea how I should use it (still in box)
I also travel and work away from home and need access to my files sometimes.
On old my desktop computer I had it setup with 2 external drives (one as extra space and one where my desktop backed up to the other external)--that seemed to work okay--but now all of these are full.
HELP!!!
Additionally, when I'm in my office, I want to hook up to a larger monitor when I'm at my desk. How do I do this?
Many thanks for any help you can give....
deb

It sounds as though you have a drive with a nominal capacity of 120GB (actual capacity as reported by Leopard, about 112GB), and it's 99% full. That's a recipe not just for slowness and inconvenience, but for disaster. At any moment your operating system and/or applications may run completely out of places for the data they need to squirrel away temporarily in the course of normal operations, with the result that apps will quit without warning or the computer will freeze, crash, or kernel panic — losing whatever unsaved files are open, perhaps damaging the hard drive directory, and perhaps as a result of that damage, losing data that was securely saved before.
You need to maintain a bare minimum of 10GB of free space at all times on a drive that size. More is better. You will want to delete at least 10GB of files from it ASAP, preferably before you use it to do any more work you can't afford to lose. OS X is very good about tolerating a less-than-optimal working environment, but you have its tolerance stretched to the breaking point right now. Don't make it snap.
The fact that your drive is only 120GB indicates that you have an older, non-unibody MBP. If that's true, you can't put a 750GB hard drive inside it, but you can still use a 640GB or 500GB drive. The installation is more difficult than installing in one of the unibody machines to which this group of forums is devoted, but you can still do it yourself if you're reasonably handy. Identify your MBP for us by processor speed, display size, and its Model Identifier (from the System Profiler utility app), and we'll be able to provide a link to DIY drive replacement instructions for it. Given the work habits you describe, replacing your undersized internal hard drive would still be the best first step for you to take, even if you have to pay a technician to install the new drive.
Message was edited by: eww

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