Dualbooting and reinstalling applications

[#686578]

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I dont often dual boot, safe to say 9/10 I'll just install a virtual machine to do something, test something, what have you.

But I wanted to give W7 a real try instead of just a test run. I want to actually use it day to day but also be comfortable switching back to XP if something's not working or hell if I just dont like it.

That being said, I've recently repartitioned my laptop and installed W7

Great, that was simple, pretty fast, and it's pretty

Now I'm getting around to actually using everything, and holy shit, I use a lot of crap. It's astounding how I cant spend an hour without installing 10 programs and 50 add ons, expansions, extensions, and what have you.

Now, this wouldnt be a problem if I had more than a 250GB harddrive, or if I weren't a pack rat or made better use of my networking storage, but I am and I dont so it is; so, is there anyway for W7 to recognize and use (properly) programs that were installed on XP? I mean sure, I can just as easily browse to my XP partition and start up Trillian and that seems to work... for some features, I could browse to Mozilla and open Firefox, but that doesnt really seem to hold any permanent changes made, not to mention I would prefer it just knew the preferences I had already. Do I have to reinstall 40GB of frequently used applications and games?

Or...

Is there some way I can have W7 recognize the installed programs for XP on another partition and use them effectively and preconfigured as if the operating system didnt give a shit and that the program itself performed as programs used to and were self contained.

[bungiefan]

Not with the way WIndows programs works. Programs aren't self-contained and modular, they place data in the Windows folder and registry that is required for them to function. On a Mac you would be able to just transplant the programs, since they tend to be self-contained. On Windows, you have to run the installer on every OS on your system, and transplanting registry entries can be a pain because XP and Win7 have different structure to their registry.

The closest you can get is to use some portable registry like CodySafe, Ceedo, or U3, but that requires you to run the software off an external drive, and may not be compatible with newer WIndows versions yet.