Monday, October 20, 2014

Exporting Installed Applications From Windows 7

I know that I am not asking this correctly.  Is there a way to tell Windows 7 that you want to move applications installed in Windows 7 to another Windows 7 installation.  In this case, I have a number of applications installed under Windows 7, and I would love to move them to a Windows 7 installation on another PC without having to uinstall and then reinstall them.
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7 comments:

  1. DaveOctober 20, 2014 at 7:44 AM

    Given the complexities of the registry, even if there is a way to do so, I wouldn't want to try it.

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  2. jdegeOctober 20, 2014 at 8:18 AM

    There's no way to do that that I am aware of.

    If you need to do this frequently, you might want to consider virtualization.

    My primary desktop is a virtual machine, running under VMWare on a Linux host. I can easily move it to any machine that will run VMWare. And backups are as simple as making a copy of the virtual hard drive.

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  3. TMLutasOctober 20, 2014 at 8:27 AM

    Anything is possible but unless you're going to make a vmware copy to run on the other computer, uninstalling and reinstalling is likely going to be the easiest solution.

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  4. Mark EriksonOctober 20, 2014 at 8:39 AM

    That's actually a reasonable way to phrase it.

    Unfortunately, as far as I know, there's no such concept in Windows. Windows doesn't have a package manager, every application is installed differently and handles its settings in different ways, and there's no easy way to just round them up and put them on another machine.

    Closest you'd get would be poking through your %UserFolder%/AppData and copying relevant-looking folders to carry settings over, but that's not going to help that much. Sorry.

    (That said: long-time reader, and very glad to hear that you're doing better!)

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  5. Marc C.October 20, 2014 at 6:18 PM

    Something like this? http://www.laplink.com/index.php/individuals/pcmover-for-windows-8/feature-overview

    I have never used it myself.

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  6. Rick COctober 20, 2014 at 9:06 PM

    Yes. You want something like this: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1586071&CatId=679

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  7. JonOctober 21, 2014 at 7:21 PM

    I used PCMover (the Laplink app mentioned above) to move stuff from an XP installation to a new Windows 7 for my wife. It moved most of what was installed quite painlessly (when compared with reinstalling all the apps I wanted moved and redoing the settings for each).

    I put the XP disk in the Win7 machine, and PCMover moved the apps and data quickly. I didn't try doing it from machine-to-machine.

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