Moving program folders without reinstalling?

[uplink]

Can someone recommend a, preferably free, program to move a progarm from one folder to another without reinstalling. e.g g:\program\blah to g:\program\folder\blah or g:\program\blah to h:\blah etc.

In other words, I want, program data and associated registry entries all changed automatically.

Thanks.

[The Allmighty]

Didn't think there was such a beast on PC. On my old mac you could simply click and drag and it would work from wherever you placed it. Given the registry I would have thought that a prog trying to do that on a pc would give rise to all sorts of potential problems. I'd reinstall the progs rather than let anything loose in the registry.

[uplink]

Tee hee, yes I'm also a Mac user and being a "proper operating system", dragging and dropping folders is not a problem!!!

[Kryten]

Most programs you cannot do this with if they have registry entries in which are path oriented (or config files the same). Its one thing I wish they added to Windows. Symbolic links take care of this in UNIX :D

[Fozzybear]

Going back quite a few years (Win95 or 98 era) I used to have a Norton (?) program that did this - you could either get it to monitor the installation of any program so it knew what files it was associated with, or if you had installed the program you wanted to move before the Norton app it could 'guess' what files were needed. Did a pretty good job too as it could monitor and change registry entries, plus you could back up the program and all it's files and registry keys to a single file to move to another installation of windows (or another pc). I guess that the other software companies were less than chuffed about that and may have forced Norton to stop selling the utility (maybe - just guessing here).

[kcxdev]

partition magic does it (or use to be able to)

[DeadKenny]

Most programs you cannot do this with if they have registry entries in which are path oriented (or config files the same). Its one thing I wish they added to Windows. Symbolic links take care of this in UNIX :D
Actually, there are links in Windows. Hard links do exist in NTFS but they are not normally available. You can get tools to do them, but being hard links they are a nightmare as you can't tell what's linked to what.

You can also do "junction points" (as Microsoft call them) in later versions of Windows (2k and XP I believe), so you could move 'Program Files' to another partition and mount that partition at 'c:\Program Files'. You can apparently also link directories to junction points rather than just a partition. They only work on a directory basis so you can do like on unix, a symbolic link to a file.

However last time I tried them in Windows, it nearly had a fit. I wouldn't recommend it.

The other option as said is Partition Magic. This has a remapping tool which basically moves the files and then searches the registry for any references to c:\Program Files, and also looks for .ini files. It's flakey at best and the only time I tried it I ended up with a half-wrecked system. Problem is, it won't account for anything that uses a non-standard way of referencing the location.

If you're running out of space, why not use Partition Magic to expand the partition? Or otherwise uninstall a few 'large' apps in Program Files and reinstall them on another drive (I do this to split system, "other" apps, and games across different partitions).

[big1]

Freeware alternatives:

COA32 (Change of Address)
http://www.freewareweb.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?ID=495

WinXP Move Me
http://downloads.wugnet.com/affiliates/tweakxp/moveme-setup-tweakxp.exe