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Program to Move Programs

By Mohammad Yousef | June 2004

Q: Do you know of a program that will allow me to move installed software from one location to another? I'm running out of room on one of my drives and would like to move a few programs to a different drive without having to uninstall them first.

A: Software installed on a computer is much different from normal files. Normal files can be copied, cut and pasted as you like but you cannot do the same to software. Actually, you can copy software from one place to another but no one can tell in advance whether it will run properly because key files and settings can be located in many places on the hard drive.

Before receiving this question, it never crossed my mind that a program to move programs might exist. So I searched the internet and asked others if they had heard of such a program. Just when I was about to give up searching, I read about Application Mover in an internet forum. This program can move software from one path on your hard disk to another and apparently, it deals with the Windows registry, configuration settings (.ini files), program shortcuts… so it’s less likely for the software to malfunction after being moved. Application Mover is probably nowhere near perfect. So in my opinion, the best thing to do is reinstall your software to make sure everything runs as it’s supposed to.