Is there, or will there ever be, a way to leave applications on while changing OS?

[Loose rivets]

I gather I'm in good company when it comes to having the OS on drive C, the Applications in D, and all me stuff in E.

It would be so nice to be able to format C every so often without loading the mass of programs we seem to collect.

Has anyone got round this, and had MS ever considered making this standard?

[mixture]

Unfortunatley, for your average home user, there's so much rubbish strewn all over the place (registry, dlls etc.) that it's simply not going to be feasible. And I think it's safe to say you'll never see "MS making it the standard".... it's too complex a challenge.

Suggest you take a peek at something like Faronics DeepFreeze (faronics dot com (http://www.faronics.com/en/Products/DeepFreeze/DeepFreezeCorporate.aspx))

Otherwise, take a leaf out of the corporate books. Format one last time, create a clean image to your liking..... ghost it ..... hey presto.... when combined with regular backups, you're back to a clean state that's not too far off where you were.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

It would be so nice to be able to format C every so often
Why?

I've found that a useful thing to do exactly once in a couple of decades of owning Windows boxes, and that was when I handed an old box to another member of the family and wanted to replace NT Server by 2000 Pro. In this case I didn't want to retain any data, obviously.

[Saab Dastard]

Rivets,

Back in the days of Win 3.1x it was pretty much possible - nearly everything was configured with .ini text files. Just copy the ini files over and hey presto, all the settings were back.

There were a few minor usability, stability, functionality, capacity (etc.) problems with those early versions of Windows, though!

SD

[mixture]

Saab,

I found a Windows 95 CD the other day on the front of which Microsoft excitedly stamped in bold letters "INCLUDING USB SUPPORT !".

I also remember the huge hype when Apple removed floppy drives from the manufacturing process.... there were people almost predicting the end of the world.

Yes, in some ways it's nice to yearn the old days...... but many aspects of technology are so much better these days. Especially in terms of hardware stability, functionality and capacity .... perhaps software developers need to learn a few lessons from the hardware geeks.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

I also remember the huge hype when Apple removed floppy drives from the manufacturing process.... there were people almost predicting the end of the world.
Thing is, I still use Quicken 2000 for my accounts, as Intuit dropped it so there aren't new versions all the time any more.

And this version nags you to back up to floppy every now and then.

Which seems like a good idea, so for an extra fiver I had a floppy put into my current box - I don't however use it for anything except Quicken!

[Shunter]

Unfortunately this is largely a Windows-ism. Sure there will always be exceptions and the fault is equally that of the developers, but the disease that is the Windows registry means this will pretty much never be possible for Windoze in its current architectural state unless applications stick to being self-contained in a read-only app directory and keep their settings and temp files in the user profile. There is generally no need to splatter crap all over the OS, but most do it because they're too ignorant to write a clean application. I notice that apps ported from other operating systems which use configuration files (very efficiently) as opposed to the registry to store their settings have no problem being shifted from pillar to post.

I've done what you're suggesting, on hundreds of Linux servers, to take advantage of new virtualisation technology. Without touching the installed apps, without touching the guest virtual machines.... The occasional reconfigure of the app to work with new libraries is about all that's required, but again only if they're not static binaries.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

There is generally no need to splatter crap all over the OS, but most do it because they're too ignorant to write a clean application.
Wot, you mean like yer typical Linux application which scatters files all over the place in locations which are hard coded and cannot be changed if they don't suit your system? It's a long time since I've seen a Windows application which absolutely insists on putting stuff in "C:\MyApp\Whatever" whether you like it or not, but this is routine for Linux stuff. It's not as if there's any consistency either, you can install half a dozen different Linux applications and they each have their different idea as to where to put log files, and as these are all hard coded locations you can't decide for yourself to put them all in the same place.

And all these crappy little configuration files are written in different languages so you have to learn each one, and if the worst comes to the worst (the GUI configuration editors don't do what you want) you're left with typing incomprehensible hieroglyphics into a text editor and hoping for the best? (OK so the registry editor can also get a bit painful, but at least you can't screw up structure and syntax in quite the same way that you can with a text editor and text file.)

[Loose rivets]

Of course, the level of expertise on this forum is way above my head, but perhaps the best example of a need to scrub a logical drive came from my many, many hours of trying to cure a sound fault on a Foxconn MB.

One of this forum's stalwarts - I'm sorry I can't remember who - suggested (words to the effect) that there might be some detritus left with the different kinds of drivers.

I'd deleted existing drivers several different ways, and battled against them as they reinstalled via W7 into what should have been a driver-less environment, but to no avail. I seriously thought of switching off the substantial sound system and buying a simple sound card, such was the extent of my defeatism at that point. :(

For some reason, (getting the partition size to 1 gig courtesy of XP disc management I think.) I reinstalled W7, having done a long format on C

Clean disc, clean install. I didn't give the sound a thought . . . until it worked perfectly.

I guess when an OS is built with a mass of discrete files, it's not that surprising to find that an application embeds itself into a sizable selection of them. But I wish they wouldn't.

[Mac the Knife]

Alas, Gertrude is right for once (not that Windows, with it's DLL hell and Byzantine registry is much of an improvement).

The Linux Standard Base - Linux Standard Base (LSB) | The Linux Foundation (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb) - consortium is trying to standardize installations across distros but progress is slow and the choice of the .rpm format (rather than .deb) is a stumbling block.

Note that compiling your own apps from source (as we all used to) with .configure, .make, .install, .make clean doesn't have these problems but a little knowledge of the system IS required.

On the other hand, most app. installers come in several flavor formats and you just have to choose the appropriate one for your distro - which is not exactly rocket science. And if you stick to the repositories for your distro (default anyway) you'll have no problems.

Gobolinux - GoboLinux - the alternative Linux distribution (http://www.gobolinux.org/) - is an interesting attempt to rationalize the traditional *NIX filesystem structure into something more accessible but really only disguises it.

As far as app installations go, the sooner Linux (and Windows) moves over to the "drag-and-drop" OS X model, where apps have their own libraries and depend on the OS only for basic functions, the better. The disk and memory space savings of shared libraries are much less of an issue on today's average box.

So yes.

Mac

[Gertrude the Wombat]

As far as app installations go, the sooner Linux (and Windows) moves over to the "drag-and-drop" OS X model, where apps have their own libraries and depend on the OS only for basic functions, the better.
You've always been able to "install" sufficiently simple Windows applications like that, there are several that I use regularly and that I can copy from machine to machine just by copying their directory. I would expect the same to be the case with Linux.

You sometimes then have to build some of the usual functions of an installer into the application, to pick a trivial example the ability to poke around in the registry to register its own file types, but that's often not a bad way to proceed anyway.