Ext USB Hardrive

[gavin smith]

Hi all,

Was looking to buy an external hardrive for general storage of music & pics as my internal ones are pretty small.

Just wanted to know if it was possible to install programmes,games and the like to the external hardrive and move it to another computer and use them or do any programmes installed need to be installed in to the windows system itself rendering the additional hardrive as storage only if you know what i mean???

 

[nrage]

Most software installs things into the windows registry which is itself stored on the system drive. In many cases the software will not run without these registry entries.

What you could do, which may work in many cases, is locate the registry entries and export them into a file which you store with the software on the external disk.

You could then connect the drive to another PC, execute the exported registry file (importing them into the PC registry) and the software will probably run.

The other thing to consider is that some software makes use of folders in the c:\documents and settings tree, like my documents or similar. You might have to manually copy this data to the external drive before you move, copying it onto the other PC when you want to use the software.

I believe there is a program you can get which monitors changes to the registry and records them, so, you could run this, install the software you want to be able to move, thus recording the changes it makes on installation, and use these changes to import into the target PC registry.

 

[Rastalovich]

The other thing to consider is that some software makes use of folders in the c:\documents and settings tree, like my documents or similar. You might have to manually copy this data to the external drive before you move, copying it onto the other PC when you want to use the software.

.

*note to self*

Reminder to make a rant thread about this.