Hi,
I would like to set up my base poser on an external drive. Do I absolutely need to have windows on it? I have Poser 6/7 & PP2010. I also have Carrara Pro 7, Bryce 6.2(?), Vue 7 Infinite and an assorted batch of other render type apps as well as a few fractal programs.

Oh and I have CS2 and PSP7 (*I love psp7).

Experts can I get your input here? ThanX!

Hugs
Ariana

No problem with that. I installed Poser Pro 2010 on an external drive and plug it into my (work) laptop when I want to use it, otherwise there is no evidence of Poser on the laptop.

bagginsbill, is there any drivers or other reliant windows .dll's necessary that need to be on the external with it? 

ThanX I am just getting back up and running after my Dell died!

Hugs

Ariana

Nope.

very cool then!

Thank you!

Hugs

Ariana

One thing I was concerned with is when any given program requires windows, does that make it so it won't function on the external, or that it will search for the OS at start up? I mean I understand about drivers and .dlls... Any thoughts on this?

I have :

Poser 6/7/PP2010
Vue 7 Pro
Carrara 7 Pro
Bryce 6
Hexagon 3
several Fractal Programs
PS/CS2
PSP 7
Artrage
Painter 11
A Waacom Bamboo
an Adesso Tablet
and so on

So I would love to have them all installed on my 500MB external.

ThanX for any help you have! :)

Hugs

Ariana

I never thought about running poser/poserpro on my external. Mine is a 1.5 terabyte.

Whenever you install complex software, there will usually be changes made to Windows itself, regardless of the installation drive of the program in question.

There might be changes to the registry, and in some cases shared components such as the Visual C++ runtime may be updated by the installer. In the case of Cinema 4D and Vue, they will usually park config files and libraries in the 'user' folder hierarchy on the Windows drive.

If the computers main disk was lost to a crash, there's no guarantee that some of what the program installed is not lost, settings, shared components, activation files.

In the case of the WACOM tablet, the drivers will almost certainly be part of the Windows installation, and not on your external disk.

What you are proposing will work fine, provided the external disk stays in place on the same drive letter. If however you were going to take your external disk to a machine that hadn't previously had the software installed, then things get complicated. It might work (e.g. BagginsBill's experience with Poser), or it might say 'where the heck have my registry settings gone', or why is the version of that Windows component different, or 'where has the software activation key gone - I've been pirated!'

Hmmmm....

Ok here is what happened. I own a Dell GX745. The motherboad, cpu, memory, vid card and the fan/heat sink all had to be replaced. Mainly because they could not figure out what hardware componet was bad (*so they rebuilt my computer). After this horrible experience I decided to have at least 3 HD's set up preloaded with Windows XP Pro. Now I suppose I could also put all of the above programs on each disk, but set up of all of those total takes many hours of installing, setting up base RT's, and also tweaking the configurations to my liking.

My thought was heck just set it up on an external, that is more dependable (*Seagate) then the avg Dell HD. I have loads of drives, 2 80GB, 4 250GB and 1 500GB (*Seagate),  2 1 TB  (*Seagate). All are SATA drives. So is the better solution to do all of the programs on the 3 drives loaded with windows? Or the 500GB external solution? One thing that sux is that I have a program that is supposed to migrate info from one disk to another, but it will not transfer any programs, so that means I have to set my programs up on each drive and do it all individually. So much time taken away from learning, rendering, products, etc.

I guess I just want to avoid the inevitable Dell crash in the future. Frankly I am sick of installing anything!!! lol........

ThanX, if I get solutions I will forward them over. If you find or have some please let me know! :)

Hugs

Ariana

Disk imaging software might help (e.g. Ghost), which can make a snapshot of the machines hard disk in its entirety.

As a Windows 7 user, the first thing I did when I got the software 'just so' on my new machine was to buy a bus powered WD drive and use the WIndows 7 image backup to make such a snapshot.

Needless to say, the first thing I did was to test that image to see if it could restore the machine back to the snapshot point, and then the disk went into the fire safe along with my normal backups.

In theory if the worst happened, I could put a new disk in there, restore the machine from the Dell setup disk (my machine is an Alienware), then restore over that with the image disk to get the machine back to its former glory with all the software installed, activated and configured.

After that, it would be the small matter of restoring all my personal data back on top of the image :-(

For backing up your windows system, I highly recommend XXClone. Unlike disk imagers, that may need to have the image restored, it will create a bootable copy of your system on another drive – just plug in the cloned drive or select it as the first boot device in the BIOS and you’re back in business. www.xxclone.com/

As MarkHirst says, almost everything these days ends up with something on the system drive and it is indeed a crapshoot as to whether it will make any difference if you move the drive to another computer, or reinstall windows. One solution would be using something like Microsoft VirtualPC, Virtual Box or VMWare to create a virtual machine and install your software in that. Then your entire windows environment and applications reside in a single file that you can move to any system that and run it. The disadvantage – particularly in the case of 3D is that the performance will suffer – you’re emulating an entire PC in software. Also, AFAIK, only one of these solutions (not sure which) supports 3D hardware acceleration, and even that is probably slower than the real thing.

The other alternative is application virtualization. VMWare sells an application called ThinApp that will package an application and effectively make it portable – it will include its own registry, user directories etc. Basically, you install the application and ThinApp monitors the install to determine what files, settings etc. to use to create the package. Then, as long as your target machine meets the basic requirements the packaged app will run. The bad news, ThinApp is $8,000+ The (possibly) good news is that I just found a free alternative called Cameyo. www.cameyo.com/index.aspx 

Haven’t downloaded or tried it, but it may be a solution. There is a 60 day trial of ThinApp but I don’t know what if any limitations it has.

In your case with Poser, I don’t think you’ll need it, I trust BB’s experience, but it may be something to keep in mind for your other applications.