External hard drive and games

[Me2]

I have a external/portable hard drive. If I was to put a game onto it could I play the game when I had the external hard drive plugged into my laptop? Or would a game not work like that?

[Marin85]

Hi,

1) There are many programs including most games that can be installed in an arbitrary folder on your system. However, they require being written to the windows registry and will read from it when being launched. So, it´s possible to install some game on an external (portable) HDD, but you will be bound to the same windows installation you have installed the game under. Also, installing a game on external HDD may lead to decreased game performance.

2) There are also games with portable installs. These bear everything needed within one folder and are not dependent on windows registry (worst case you may have to add some given registry file to windows registry, but this can be done quickly on every windows installation). In general, portable versions of games are actually hacked normal versions!

3) There is always the chance that some given game won´t work from an external HDD as there are other programs known to fail to start from an external HDD. Seems this also depends on the windows version.

Hope this answers your question,

Marin