PC help needed

[StevieM]

Are there any computer nerds,geeks-----errr----Experts! That's the word I'm looking for

Long, complicated, boring story, but I'll need to transfer  programes from a PC to a laptop pretty soon. The main ones I need to do are downloaded ones that I can't get again.
Is there anyway to transfer these from one to another? Possibly I may have to keep them on an external hardrive first for a while, then onto the new one.
 They're coming off of Windows XP to Windows 7.

A big cheers.

[Flash Harry]

Oh ho!

That's not really possible, particularly as you are going to be using a different OS. The difficulty is that the installation process embeds information in the computers registry which controls aspects of the machine's behaviour. Simply copying the program files from one to another won't work and manually modifying the registry and getting it right will be extremely time consuming and will need real care and attention to detail. It's a non-starter really.

An alternative would be to take an image of the hard disk of the XP machine on the hard disk of the new machine, boot it and add the necessary drivers to the new machine so it runs happily under XP. Then do an upgrade on the OS to Windows 7. There are bits of software out there that will help you do that - Symantec Ghost is one such, but there are others.

I can't guarantee it will work, but it's your best bet.

[dasilvasings]

Agree with flashharry.

Let me just point out that more and more portable applications are being released (supposedly they don't mess with registry - you can copy them to a pendisk and run on any computer).

Check for example

http://portableapps.com/

[StevieM]

Bugger!
Cheers guys, I thought that'd probably be the answer.
The one I really want to do is Mixcraft. This was sent to me by a guy in the States, can't remember the programe we used, but it lets one PC connect to another and stuff can done remotely. It was pretty weird watching all that stuff happening on my computer and me not doing it!!!!
I'll just have to try to get hold of him and ask very very nicely if he could do it again, 'cos I bet it's not a pen transfer one
The others I'll just have to re-install, or download again. Trying to save a bit of time, but that's life, I suppose.

I'll check out that ghost programe too.

Cheers.

[64Guitars]

You can download Mixcraft from the following page, including older versions.

http://www.acoustica.com/mixcraft/download.htm

For other old programs, try http://www.oldversion.com/.