Sharing applications between OS's

[OrangeDoor]

Imagine having 3 partitions.
1) Windows XP
2) XP 64 - bit
3) Applications

Is it possible to share the applications among the OS's ? Or would one have to install something on XP then install it again over itself in XP 64 ? Is there a program that can manage the apps and registry settings across the OS's ?

Any other creatives ideas would be appreciated.

 

[spyordie007]

There are some applications that will work this way (by just launching the executable from your other OS); however the majority of applications out there will require you to run through the install routine so that the correct registry entries are created and/or files are added to the system.

For the most part you're going to have to install every application in each OS. I realize that this takes up extra storage space, but for simpliciticy sake I recommend doing it this way.

 

[VirtualLarry]

There are some applications that are designed to be able to be installed "overtop" the same filesystem location, from different OSes. The same files get installed into the \Program Files directory, but different registry entries, files in \WINDOWS dir, etc. MS Visual C/C++ 6.0 is one of those, I had it installed in both Win98se and W2K, but the actual files were only in one place. Other apps, like WinRAR, WinImage, mIRC, XNews, and similar, you can just run from either OS, and they will automatically create the registry entries that they need, etc. The third possibility is that the application's installer installs files with the same name into the same location, but different files depending on the OS. Those cannot properly operate from an "overlapped install" from different OSes. Also, I like to keep all of my partitions visible and with the same drive letter, in all of my OSes, to facilitate just this sort of thing, application or user profile-sharing between multi-boot OS installations.