Sonic record now

Factual Questions
1

Maybe I’m posting prematurely with this issue, but the other day in an attempt to bring Adaptec’s Sonic Record Now over to my computer from my wife’s laptop. I took my 1 GB kingston ram stick and dragged the entire Sonic folder onto my stick.

When I put the stick into my computer and dropped the folder back onto my desktop’s…err, desktop. Well, anyway- it doesn’t work, it tells me I’m missing one or more of the DLL files to it run. The thing is, I don’t remember this being an issue when I grabbed graphics programs off the school computers so I would have something to practice with and use at home so I didn’t have to stay there. (If you’re wondering I did end-up buying those programs.)

I’m just saying, why is it so difficult to copy this program over to the other computer so I can use my burner? Seems like it would’ve been harder to do from school… :confused:

2

That will never work for almost any commercial Windows software. There are some small shareware/freeware programs that are self contained and many older programs (pre-Win95), but pretty much any regular 32-bit program requires various .dlls and other files.

In addition, most of the time MANY, MANY registry entries have to be made and the non-system .dlls and activex components have to be registered on the system.

Pretty much the only way to get that application on your current system is to get the CD and install it. If it’s pre-installed (Dude, did you get a Dell? :slight_smile: ), and the only place it exists is on a restoration CD or partition, then you’re SOL, not to mention in all likelihood breaking the license agreement unless a) the target system is a current-model Dell AND b) you remove the application from your wife’s system.

3
      • Well, this might be illegal, and it can end up being a tremendous amount of bother but still, just for the technical aspect I will say:
  1. You can go and try to run the program on the new PC, and every time it says a dll file is missing, find that file on the old PC and copy it to the new one to the same location (assuming both are on the same OS, if not, copying-over many not be possible due to OS-specific config settings).
  2. After all the DLL files are there it still might not run. There may be registry settings you need, and for that you can use regedit and go through the registry on the old machine, and copy out all the registry entries relating to the particular software. Search for the software’s name as well as the publisher’s name.
  3. Also to do this you should turn the date of the newer PC back to whatever day the program was installed on the old PC. This is because as a cheepo-anticopy procedure, some programs will encode the creation date of a file into the file itself, as that file is written. Say for instance in one of those DLL’s. And then every time the program starts, it looks at the date stored inside the DLL, and compares that to the file’s listed creation date, and if they don’t match then the program will refuse to start.
  4. also–since you are dealing with recording hardware–it may have a specific config for the original PC’s hardware. So after all this, it still may not work. “Regular” programs just use software-video display and let the OS handle all their sound output, so it’s generally not an issue with them. Anyway, good luck.

If you really want to know what goes on during a program install, then get a copy of System Mechanic from Iolo. It has a “Safe Installer” that can log all changes made during a program install, as well as completely undo those changes if you use it to uninstall.

(there may be other programs that do this, but Iolo is the only one I’ve heard of)
~

4

Question aside, you should already have CD burning software on your PC somewhere. If it’s running XP then OS can handle it, otherwise if your drive came with the PC it will have some burning software pre-installed. If the drive was a later addition, every burner I’ve ever seen (even OEM) came with software.