P.NET on a portable drive?

[khedron]

I went overboard this Christmas, bought myself a 1GB memory stick. Started putting programs on it from the Portable Application Collection and others.

Trouble is, there seem to be no good image editing programs in there. At least, as good as Paint.NET.

My question is, what does Paint.NET need to run? Could I, in theory, copy the Program Files directory straight onto my memory stick and run it from there? (Assuming .NET 1.1 and 2.0 on the other computer.) Or does it require registry keys or other registration?

Thanks for your time.

[Rick Brewster]

You should be able to run it from a thumb drive just fine. Just copy the Program Files\Paint.NET directory and you're good to go.

However, you will lose certain features. Printing, scanning, and thumbnails for .PDN files in Explorer are the primary ones. These features require certain DLL's to be registered correctly. Paint.NET will also not be registered as the editor for the BMP, JPG, PNG, PDN, or TGA image types.

[khedron]

That's okay, I'll just open the files from within P.NET.

Thanks for the prompt reply.

[Bob]

And what about installing it in: "[MemoryStick]:\Paint .NET\" ??

Any difference?

[khedron]

I suppose that the program would work on all computers as if you had copied it to the memory stick manually.

However, I'm guessing that the features such as "Printing, scanning, and thumbnails for .PDN files in Explorer" would only be present on the computer you originally installed it on, as that would be the only computer that had the .PDN dlls registered. Maybe even not on that computer unless your memory stick was plugged in, since Explorer would have to access the .dlls to use them.

[Rick Brewster]

Windows might also freak out if you unplugged the memory stick on that computer, because it had loaded the shell extension DLL (which provides the thumbnails) from the memory stick.