Pack your bags and get out! Moveable software?

[sublime]

A quick question: can I move a program from my main memory to my CF card just by cutting and pasting, or is there a more complicated process involved? It's just that Textmaker takes up around 8Mb, and, well, that's a lotta memory! I'm worried that cutting and pasting might screw something up. Should I worry?

[Mike Temporale]

Yes you should worry. Most applciations need to know exactly where to find other files that it relies upon. By moving the application to another location, it will have problems working. At least this is the case with 90% of the programs out there.

You are better off to uninstall, and then reinstall it in the correct location.

Of course, there is no harm in trying. Do a backup first, and if it fails to run, be prepared to undo every change you make before you try to uninstall the application.

[hamishmacdonald]

I've done this successfully in the past. The main concern is that your Start and Program menu shortcuts will need to be replaced with a shortcut to the new location of the program. (Copy the application itself, go to Windows/Start Menu or Windows/Start Menu/Programs, click and hold, and select "Paste shortcut".)

[SoftMaker]

A quick question: can I move a program from my main memory to my CF card just by cutting and pasting, or is there a more complicated process involved? It's just that Textmaker takes up around 8Mb, and, well, that's a lotta memory! I'm worried that cutting and pasting might screw something up. Should I worry?
TextMaker survives getting moved around gracefully. You just have to update the shortcuts in the Start menu manually.

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

[toxostoma]

I moved TextMaker also to a storage card... In addition to the shortcuts in the programs folder / start menu, I had to update one other thing. My file associations for certain extensions (.doc and .tmd, possibly others?) were pointing to the old location of TextMaker. This meant that everytime I tried to open up a word file from a file explorer, or that was sent as an email attachment, I would get an error message. Using Pocket Tweak, I went in and changed the file extensions to point to TextMaker's new location.

[toxostoma]

One more thing - I would like to make one suggestion to SoftMaker (TextMaker's creator).

Have TextMaker show up under the list of removable programs. (Settings - remove programs doesn't show TextMaker in the list). I assume that if I wished to uninstall it I would just find it's directory and delete it, but that isn't a comformating way to do things. I'd much rather uninstall it through the OS or through ActiveSync, so that I know that I'm not messing anything up. Ideally, the registry should get cleaned up, unneeded file extensions removed or pointed back to their proper place, etc. I doubt any of this happens if I just delete the program directory.

I don't think I'll be uninstalling the program any time soon as I'm happy with it, but I was just pointing this out because it makes me a little uneasy.