Greetings to all,
I would like to know how not to lose the programs already installed if I have to format my PC.
Still worth the keys?
Lose and programs?
Thank you very much for your help, and you have a good day.
Un saludo a todos,
Me gustaría saber como no perder los programas ya instalados si tengo que formatear mi ordenador.
Siguen valiendo las claves?
Pierdo ya los programas?
Muchas gracias por vuestra ayuda, y que tengáis un buen día.
ChrisS
Administrator
Use back-up software to store an image or files to either a second internal drive or an external drive. Rather than reformatting you'd simply restore from the back-up. Depending on the software you can make "point in time" back-ups or incremental back-ups. Either way, you should consider different back-up schemes for your programs, which should be fairly static, and your data which changes frequently.
Software options abound... find one that best suits your intended purpose:
Gizmo's Probably the Best Free Security List in the World
Dottech's Best free file backup, drive backup (aka imaging), and system backup software
Also, do yourself a favor and make sure that you either have the means to boot from another drive or that the boot disk that your software creates will actually boot your system before disaster strikes. Back-up files and images don't do any good if you can't get them restored.
If you format your PC, you stand a good chance of losing any GOTD products and/or games. It is possible that you can zip the items and then unzip them after the format but you have only a 50/50 chance of it working. Any products that use the registry, other than for the uninstall, will revert to trial or just not work.
Note that all products installed from here note that they are only good for that one day and do not have support or updates. What you are wanting to do is under the heading of "updates" and is not supported.
I'll note that when I simply created a new user for my PC a few years ago, I ended up losing quite a few games because of the way the developer used the registry!
mikiem2
Moderator
Ideally you should buy those apps you use to support the developer's efforts. Still, if you search through the forum you'll find some suggestions on saving or moving apps. Some of those suggestions will say don't format & reinstall Windows -- fix the Windows you've got instead. Laplink sells an app designed to move your installed software to another PC, though I've no idea how well, or if it works. Keeping records can help...
As Dragonlair pointed out, sometimes the registration or activation data's stored in the registry, & sometimes everything the app or game needs to work is in the app's or game's folder. Sometimes that data's stored in Windows User folders/files, & sometimes it's kept in the Windows' folder itself. Some developers are more generous as well.
Paragon & Ashampoo store your program keys in their on-line database for example, so as long as you save the original setup program you can re-install whenever. Some developers provide keys that work with their regular trial downloads, sometimes for a set period of time, some until a new version is released.
Do note that it's becoming increasingly common for software keys &/or activation to be dependent on some hardware ID, e.g. the number for your system hard drive. A hard drive will have one embedded #, plus one assigned to partitions when created & formatted [the volume serial number]. It's not a bad idea to check that sort of thing out *before* you make changes, whether formatting & re-installing Windows or replacing a drive or even something like changing from IDE to AHCI -- licensed software may no longer work, & it may take weeks worth of hassles contacting the software company to try & get things fixed. Adobe's bad about that but you're supposed to know to deactivate your installed copy ahead of time, reactivate after you're done. One simple precaution you can take is to write down the existing volume serial number for the drive(s)/partition(s) -- from a command prompt at the root of the partition, e.g. C:\ , just type dir & press the Enter key. Sysinternals [microsoft.com] makes one of several free apps to change that volume number to whatever you want, like the serial number that partition had when you activated your software, sometimes avoiding a lot of hassle.
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
You could check the comments for any of the giveaways you found really useful and check to see what freeware alternatives were posted on that day. you can guarantee that virtually every giveaway has had suggestions of this nature.
You could also manually export registry keys for specific programs you may want to keep. I can't go into details as to be honest the giveaways are only supposed to be activated on the day of the giveaway. Telling users how to circumvent this could compromise further giveaways as if a developer thinks their giveaway can be activated by all anytime after the giveaway, why would they give it in the first place. I'd like to explain further but I'm really busy at the moment.
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