Transfer of software

[Piff]

I have recently changed desktop pc and old scanner wasn't compatible.
Took old scanner to the local dump last week together with it's parallel card & software.
New combined printer/scanner/copier/fax installed.
I've now realised that I need the old software (bundled image editing Micrografx Photo Magic).
I have the software installed on my laptop (both laptop & desktop run windows XP sp3).

Is there an easy (idiot proof) way to copy the software from the laptop to the desktop, preferably by CD so that I have a copy for re-installation in the future if I need it?

 

[Antharro]

Generally not. Sometimes you can get lucky and copy the program folder from C:\Program Files to the new computer, but usually programs tend to have registry entries and files in the Windows and Windows System folders and a half-dozen other places that make moving them quite impractical.

If you do copy that folder over and find it works, you can put it on CD so you have a copy.

Micrografx software is extremely old now - they were bought out by Corel in 2001. I know Picture Publisher 7 was given away on the front of PCW magazine many years ago, which is how I got my copy.

If you're just doing basic photo editing, resizing, etc, you may want to look at some of the following:

Picasa by Google - More like photo management software, but does have some editing features built in.

Photoscape

Paint.NET (requires Microsoft's dotNet v2 framework or ideally v3.5 SP1 to be installed, you can get these through Windows Update)

GIMP - A bit more advanced and fairly powerful, can also be used for working with photos.

All of the above are free!

 

[Piff]

To explain a little more, I'm scanning in scale drawings as .tif files, manipulating a little by adding or painting out a line, adding colour, etc.
I need the files to remain as .tif or .jpg so others can easily open the same files.
I've got Paint.NET which I have been trying to use. But the final printing process uses a windows wizzard which automatically rescales the images and they are printing out 6% smaller - no good for a scale drawing.
I've got an old version of CorelDraw - but this changes all the file types - no good for sending to others.
I've got Serif PhotoPlus 6 - again it wants to change the file types to it's own format. Also it has a glitch where selecting an area and "cutting" causes the program to crash every time. I've tried uninstalling & re-installing a downloaded version but this crashes also.
I seem to be going round in circles! Wasting more time trying to get software to work the way I was used to, rather than getting on with the actual work.
My current method is to scan into Paint.NET, manipulate the image, transfer to laptop via memory stick & open up in Micrografx and print from there!
I'll have a look at the other suggestions you made.

 

[Piff]

I had a look at Gimp but couldn'y see that it had a print option. Also looked at photoscape which seemed to be too photo biased for me (I didn't download these so I'm making my judgements based on their web sites)

I've had a go at transferring Micrografx onto a usb stick. Moved it to my desktop and tried clicking on the program icon. For the first 5 or 6 attempts it said it could not find .dll files.
I wnet back to the laptop & copied these files over 1 by 1 into the "windows" & "windows/system" folders
Now double clicking on the program icon on the usb stick starts & runs the program from the usb stick.

I can't find an "installer" on the USB stick. Should I just create a folder under "programs" & dump all the files there or should I try add/remove programmes in control panel?

edit
Control panel couldn't find the installer, so I dumped the files, created a short cut & I'm back in business!