Bits'n'Bytes

As heard on CJCD

Episode 5

Good morning, and welcome to this week's installment of Bits 'n' Bytes - brought to you by Bowco Computer Services.

Quite often, someone will ask me to transfer a program they have from one computer to another, without the original disk. "I lost it", I'm told. Other than the fact that this is most likely quite illegal, it's also a lot more difficult to do than most people would imagine. "Well, can't you just copy the whole folder onto the new computer?" I get asked. "No, actually, in most cases you can't", I have to tell them. And here's why:

When you install a program from a CD it copies all the files and folders the program needs from the CD to your computer. But, it also writes a whole bunch of entries to your computer's registry.

Now, think of the registry as a giant phone book for your computer. When the files and folders get copied to your hard drive, the computer has to know where on your hard drive they went. When the computer runs the main executable file of the program, it needs to know what other helper files to run at the same time - and there's usually lots of these helper files needed to run any one program. Well, the registry is a list of what address each file went to on the hard drive. And a list of which helper files are needed for each program, and what order to load the helper files, and the address of each of these helper files and a bunch of other needed information.

So, just copying the files over to the new computer usually won't work. You need to be able to copy the registry entries too. Finding all the registry entries for most programs would take days, even for someone who knew what to look for. It would be far easier to find the original CD and buy a new license for it - or even just buy the newest version of the program.

Stay tuned next week for “I bought the program, now it's mine. Isn't it?"

I’m Computer Dave, thanks for your time.