please read details - involves software?

Question

my question is, i have microsoft office 2007 on my pc and wanted to install it oin my external hard drive so i can use it on other PCs...how would i go about doing this?

Answer 1

Can't do it for multiple reasons.

1) It is licensed to be installed on a single system.

2) While the files installed to disk may be on the external drive, some files will still end up in the common folders on the Windows primary partition.

3) Registry entries for the software will be stored on the primary drive.

** Edit **
Tinface - The registry isn't a set of files that you can copy. You can export entries from the registry to a file and then import but in the case of a complex application, you'd have to have in depth knowledge of everything MS Office is putting in there. MS Office creates a lot of entries in the registry to handle file association, shared objects/components, COM object registration for integration (VBA, VB, C#, etc...). I don't think you want to attempt that. Messing with the registry can be pretty dangerous to the system stability if you don't know what you are doing.

Answer 2

This is not possible. The reason is a bit complicated but the bottom line is that when you install a program it modifes the Windows on the machine you install it on. Therefore if you installed it on an external drive, when you try to run it from a different machine that different machines Windows won't have the necessary modifications created by the program when it was installed so it won't work.

Theoretically you could install Windows on the external drive, then set your computer to BOOT from the external drive, then install the software to the external drive, however the problem then would be that during the Windows install process Windows is modified based on your motherboard type, video card, and other hardware of the PC you are using to install Windows. So when you take the external drive with Windows on it and try to boot from it on another PC, unless the hardware in that PC matches exactly Windows will likely not boot anyway.

Answer 3

You need the disk. + you will need to uninstall it from the pc & then reinstall it on the external drive. As for the license, it might not work on the new drive because it's registered to the old drive. Which might lead to this complication every time you hook it up to a new pc.

That being said, MS doesn't want you to use their product on other pc's. In fact they specifically state in their license agreement that they don't want you to do this.

I suppose you could contact MS & ask for your license to be transferred to the new drive because your original harddrive (pick creative reason for it's demise) & you had to reinstall a new harddrive. But I am never an advocate of theft or lying.

You could just install openoffice.org on the external drive for use on the other pc's. It's compatible with MS office, so there wouldn't be a problem with doing so. + it's a lot easier to use this free product rather than spend oddles of time figuring out how to bypass the MS legality/registration issues.

Answer 4

You can install it to your External drive no problem, just select "Customize" from your install options & change the directory to where it will install to your external drive.

However, you cannot just take your drive to another pc & expect it to work as the other pc will not have the registry information to run it. It will still only work on the pc which you installed it on.

Answer 5

you would have to copy the registry files from you know from the registry and then add that file to the registry of the new PC and w/e you need to have acces to the reg files though, and ya...i dunno if cant just copy the registry file into the installed Word folder and just run it as is...ask an expert...