Migrate Your Games to Vista...Without Reinstalling!

[Twisted_Firestarter]

If you are doing a clean install of Vista and would like to migrate your games over without having to reinstall there is a way to do it that works most of the time.

In my case, I have a C: drive, which I installed vista on and D: drive, which was my old XP drive; it has all my apps/games. So, basically, all my games are already installed on D:, but my Vista OS can't run them because they were never installed on Vista.

Simple solution: From XP run regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software. Go into each of keys of each of the companies that have games you want to run in Vista. Find the game subkey, right-click on it and choose "export". Save the reg file, boot back into Vista. Edit the regfile and replace all references to C:\ to point to D:\ and run the reg file. Voila!

So, if you wanted to get 2142 working in Vista you would export the EA GAMES and also Electronic Arts keys to import into Vista.

This has worked on 4 of the 5 games I tried it on. The 5th game was a private beta and said the beta key had expired. But other than that one they all worked great.

Some notes of caution...although you could export the parent key, be careful when doing this. It would be OK to export, for example, Electronic Arts, which only has game subkeys, but would cause all sorts of issues if you exported Microsoft, which has many, many subkeys not at all related to games. In general, games do not install any DLLs or require specially installed system files, whereas applications typically do. Also, there may be some negative side-effects I'm not aware of. Certainly a clean install of the game has the potential to cause fewer issues, but if you want a quick-and-dirty solution that doesn't require the time to reinstall from scratch and then repatch and configure, this works well.

[Tempus]

Good stuff!