If you had a Mac, you could do this. You could get a small portable hard
drive, and have a whole system on it, and use that to run on whatever
system you took it to and booted up on. But, if say the other system had
some drivers and stuff it needs for like a sound card, you'd have to
install them. I'm pretty sure Finale wouldn't ask about registration
again (as it's installed already on the HD).
Perhaps if I have time over the weekend I'll test it out. I'm 95% sure
it would work if you were on a Mac. On a Windows PC?
Er.......um.........um............I know that Windows XP licenses itself
to a certain hardware configuration. So, I don't think you could do
anything like the above........
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
Thanks to everyone for ideas on this.
Many programs just run wherever they are put, such as the mail client I use
(single-user Eudora). I drag the whole directory onto the thumb drive and
just run it from there.
I knew Finale had a formula for determining installations, but I just
wondered if one could install Finale to a thumb drive and then have it run
only from there. Each thumb drive (or flash card or microdrive, for that
matter, which can also be inserted in a USB interface) has a serial number,
so a portable Finale certainly could be tied to the device using a license
key based on the serial number. It could be authorized the same way. Other
than registration lock, there's nothing in the Windows registry that
couldn't be placed in a program initialization file instead. Since the
reauthorization process is done in part on trust anyway ("call & explain"),
I think using these portable storage devices wouldn't pose a big corporate
threat. :)
I'd certainly like to take Finale along on the neck strap that holds my
passwords and email program. It certainly beats a laptop for weight!
Dennis
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