hey everyone, just a quick question here, i have had XP on my PC for a long while now, and put Vista on it the other night so now i can dual boot once again, but i'm curious as to if i can run the same programs in XP in Vista without having to reinstall them in vista itself, thus saving space on the hard drives. i was thinking about just copying and pasting my program files from the XP drive over to Vista's program files, but then i realized that i wouldn't have the programs in the start menu or anything like that. so any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks
it wont work because when you install a program it writes important stuff to the registry. so the program files are basically useless when copied to another partition.
It works fine for games, I just create a shortcut to the exe file and use that. Game saves are a bit messed up though, but that depends on the individual game. Some games like Bioshock save to a folder in My documents, so if you use both systems, the saves will be going in different places.
sorry it took me a while to respond guys, i never got an email saying the thread was updated. but i didnt think it would work by copying the files over. oh well, ill just have to reinstall all of them i guess. thanks all