Hi. i've recently got Photoshop CS2 but want to install it to an external drive, but be able to take the drive to other computers and just run it directly off of the external drive, however there are registry settings required on the main hard drive. When i try to run photoshop on another machine, it says the activation details/user name etc... are wrong or cannot be found because of this. Is there a way i can actually run it from the external source without installing the registry fix onto every machine. I only want it to run from the external source.

Sorry, no way to do that. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

Would it work if the external drive were to have its own seperate installation of windows, and then if i boot windows from it, install it to it, thus using the registry on that disk. Would that not work?

Yes, that would work but again on the PC that it was attached to when you installed it. What you are trying to do, in reality, is use one copy of a copyrighted application on more than one PC which is against it's license agreement. Take a moment to read through it so that you will better understand what rights it grants you. Would it not be easier to move the file/s that you want to view within the application to the machine that has the license to use it? USB Flash drive maybe or shared drives over a LAN. Bryan

Not sure about photoshop, but I have Adobe Premiere which allows me to install it on more than 1 PC. As explained to me (by Adobe themselves), I can install the software on any and all of my own personal computers. There is the license agreement that you can only run it on one PC at a time (whoch obviously is on your honor). What happened to my quote

Bryco's suggestion to somehow get the files to your system to work on, is the only practical solution. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

"Would it work if the external drive were to have its own seperate installation of windows, and then if i boot windows from it, install it to it, thus using the registry on that disk. Would that not work?" The problem with that solution is that the hardware would change from machine to machine that you tried to connect to. And some machines still have problems booting from external drives. Even if you could boot from it you would have to at least do a repair installation of XP on that drive every time you tried to boot it on another machine - unless the machines were pysically the same. One option would be to find a freeware application that does not require licensing and does not rely upon any registry entries. It would have a much smaller feature set, but may have the ability to do the work you need. Michael J