Copy Applications

Probably a silly question, but I was helping a friend with their Vista machine, and they wanted to copy an application (called Doctor Diagnosis, or something like that) from their XP Laptop to their Vista desktop.

I assumed it would be easy as pie. I slapped a flash drive into the laptop, copied over the desktop icon for the app, went into explorer for the folder that the shortcut pointed to, copied all the folders to the drive, put the drive into the Vista, copied the shortcut to the desktop, copied the folders into C:/Windows/Program Files - exactly where it was on the laptop), and figured the application would open up on Vista as it did in XP.

Of course, that didn't work. When I double clicked on the icon in Vista, it took me to Windows Explorer. When I looked at the properties for the desktop shortcuts, the one on the XP PC was listed as an application, while the one on the Vista was called a File Folder, or something close to that. I saw no way to change the property to be an application.

So I simply downloaded the app on to the Vista PC.

But it got me wondering... How would I copy an application from one PC to another?

It's not that simple, especially for applications which rely on registry-based configuration and initialisation info.

You'd be better off finding the original media for the app and running a from-scratch installation on the Vista machine, then copying over just the application's data files.