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wanting an option to save programs to sd card

clmooring

New Member
Will Microsoft ever create an option to save apps the sd card. I know their are ways to change the registry to do this, but I don't want to save all programs to the sd card. I want the option to move programs to the sd card. This was a feature that google added to android and I hope that MS will consider adding this feature to windows rt. Does anyone know if this might be in the cards?
 

leeshor

Well-Known Member
Welcome to the forum

As long as I have been in the computer business Microsoft has not allowed installing software to any removable storage. There is some risk involved with that and I don;t see it happening. Android's ability to move apps hasn't exactly been the great thing everyone had hoped for. And it isn't Windows, or Microsoft.
 
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clmooring

New Member
Thanks for the quick response. I have to admit I am a little surprised by your comment though. It has been a while, but I am pretty sure that I could run apps from floppy drives..... 5" and 3.5" using DOS and windows. It may be that my grey hair is clouding my memory. I think the surface 2 is a great device; I even like the RT no legacy apps concept. But I have this constant fear of consuming my 64gigs of memory with apps. Wouldn't be great to load apps to the card?
 

leeshor

Well-Known Member
You could run installations from a floppy and back in the days of DOS you could run some programs from a floppy but that's ancient history. ;)
 
Welcome to the forum

As long as I have been in the computer business Microsoft has not allowed installing software to any removable storage. There is some risk involved with that and I don;t see it happening. Android's ability to move apps hasn't exactly been the great thing everyone had hoped for. And it isn't Windows, or Microsoft.
How long has that been? :D

It is only the introduction of the Windows App Store that Microsoft has not allowed installing software to removable storage. Prior to the Windows App store, Microsoft didn't force developers to use Microsoft's installer APIs to install their software.

There were 3rd party companies that provided Windows software installation services.... InstallShield and Wise were two of the larger ones. Developers could restrict where their software was installed, or allow it. That was part of the functionality of the installer wrapper.
 

leeshor

Well-Known Member
The only programs I am aware if that can actually be installed to removable storage, a flash drive, are specialized utilities not actual programs. There are certainly a lot of apps that can be copied to a flash drive and parts (sometimes all) of it can be run from there remain there, "portable" apps.

I directly support over 300 systems with hundreds of different programs and none can be "installed" to any external memory.

Even if you have a partitioned drive in a PC, (C and D) and install a program to D it will still use quite a bit of space on C as all the support files will end up in Windows or Windows\system32 and there is no way to change that and have the program ruin properly.
 
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