BLEG: How do I move programs?


I don’t often come blegging (that’s “using a blog for begging” for you newbies) to you guys. Well, okay, I’ll beg for you guys to click on that ad banner up above, but the term usually means begging for someone in our wide audience to come up with an answer to a question.

Put simply, how do I move a program from one location to another within my computer without going through the rigamarole of uninstalling and reinstalling? Is there some Freeware/Shareware program which will take a program currently located on Drive x and move it to a new location on Drive y, moving all the settings so that it runs just as if I’d installed it on Drive y in the first place? Years ago, I vaguely recall having a McAfee uninstaller program on an ancient version of McAfee utilities which would do that; I never used it, but that tells me that it is possible.

My current computer was set up at the outset as having a 15 Gig drive C and an 80 gig Drive D. (I believe that’s just a partition on the same drive.) This was a really sucky way to set it up, because with modern Windows computers, they use a “Documents and Settings” directory to retain the data for all of your programs as well as documents, image files, the default location for iTunes music, etc. No matter how hard I try to avoid using the C drive where Windows is installed, it fills up pretty fast. I’m now out of room.

I wish I could move some files over to the D drive to alleviate my space problems. If I could move “Documents and Settings” to the D drive, even better!

Anyone have any answers for me? Any replies are appreciated. Well, Mac people can just shut up.

UPDATE!
This is why blegging works! in less than half a day, with only four replies, I have several different but all useful answers!

Brian Murray’s answer below is such a simple solution, and yet I had no idea it was possible. I long ago built a second “My Documents” directory on my larger drive, but all of my programs (printer, scanner, camera, iTunes, etc.) point by default to the Windows-established directory on the small C drive. I didn’t know you could move it. I’ve done so, and moved all of my files from the old “My Documents” to the new location on the D drive. For some reason, my C Drive doesn’t appear to have gained any space; I’m still investigating that as I write this.

Jeroen Mostert found a tutorial for moving the “Documents and Settings” as well, and “BC” points me to Application Mover.

So, between these three answers, I’ve moved “My Documents” to the bigger D drive, I may be able to move “Documents and Settings”, and I’ll be able to move many of my programs from the “Program Files” folder on the C drive to the “Program Files” folder on D. This should alleviate my problem.

And now this blog post will be up for years to help anyone else who has the same problem. I’ll have to flag it with some helpful keywords so that others can find it in Google.

Thank you very much, everyone. If you still have further helpful hints, please continue to post. And if you found this post useful, please reply!


4 responses to “BLEG: How do I move programs?”

  1. I believe you can right click on the “My Documents” folder and in the Target tab you will see a Target folder location option. In the middle there is a button labelled “Move…”. Clicking on that you should be able to move your My Documents directory which while not moving your installed programs does seem to answer your final question.

    BTW – I use Linux.

  2. I recently did the same thing. The C drive also wouldn’t gain any space. I defragmented my hard drive and it seemed to help it. I’m not sure if it was the defrag that did it (my music took awhile to update on my media player, about four days!) or if it just took a long time, but now the C drive is only half full as opposed bursting at the seams.

  3. I only have something discouraging to tell you.

    Years ago Norton Uninstall did the thing of moving programs from one location on your HD to another and then cleanly and properly rewrote your registry and reassigned the shortcuts so that your drives would be easy to navigate and that nothing would be damaged.

    I loved it.

    I was pissed to hell to find that the underpinnings of Windows XP were so different from Windows 98 and Windows 95 that Norton Uninstall not was not useable, so I could not use the Norton Move subprogram, but just having the Norton Uninstall program installed on my system with Windows XP would crash it and prevent it from booting properly ever ever ever again until I uninstalled the Norton program as it and the OS would not coexist.

    So the quick answer is: no I looked.

    However I do wish someone would correct me and tell me of where I can find a cheap replacement.

    The other option is to find a way to do multiple operating systems on your CPU, turn on Windows 98 and run Norton Uninstall which does exactly what you ask. Unfortunately Symantec hasn’t published Norton Uninstall since the nineties, has far as I know. But… I do have a copy.

    So if you can install two operating systems to view the system on one computer then I’ll send you a clone of Norton Uninstall… if you send me the entire Kent Cheeks Orlando collection. Trussst…. meeee….!


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