Program Installation & Uninstallation

Now that you’ve finally installed both Operating Systems you can go on to install additional programs, games & so on. This section can be fairly subjective in certain areas so be careful.

As I recommended earlier, your FAT32 (Windows 98/Me) partition should be larger than your NTFS (Windows 2000) partition (although preferably you would have an entirely separate partition for sharing applications & such). The reason for this being that most installations will be onto a FAT32 partition.

The basic process for this is: 

1. Install the program in either OS.

2. Install the program (again) in the other OS, into the same directory as you previously installed it.

3. Any updates/patches for the application installed should take place in the exact same way, i.e. install the update in 1 OS & re-apply it again in the other.

Here’s an example of a typical installation which you might go through. In Windows Millennium Edition I install Unreal Tournament to C:\UnrealTournament. I restart in Windows 2000 & install Unreal Tournament to the same directory, i.e. C:\UnrealTournament. Next I download the 436 patch, once more I install the patch in Windows Millennium first, then in Windows 2000 I re-apply it.

The reason for this is so the relevant registry entries or other file updates occur in both Operating Systems. Otherwise the Operating System that the Application wasn’t installed in may not run it. It’s not very convenient but it’s certainly better than having multiple installations of 1 Application. The only problem I have encountered with this is that of Uninstallation.

Uninstalling

Generally uninstalling in one OS will not make the other aware that it has been uninstalled. So using Add/Remove programs in the other OS will generally return an error message of some sort should you try to Uninstall the program again (In this instance it’s purely to have it removed from the list), although many will remove/prompt you as to whether or not it should remove the program from Add/Remove Programs should this happen.

If you wish to Manually remove a program from the Add/Remove Programs list do the following. Click on Start, Run, type in regedit & hit Enter. Open the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Uninstall] key & from the list of subkeys here, e.g. SchedulingAgent, delete the subkey(s) which reference Uninstalled programs.

E.g. If you uninstalled Unreal Tournament in Windows 2000, but in Windows 98/Me Add/Remove Programs returns an error upon attempting Uninstallation you would need to delete the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Uninstall\UnrealTournament] key.

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