Running Word from a flash drive

[Larry]

There are special "portable" programs designed to be installed and run on a
flash drive, including portble version of Foxfire, Abi Word, OpenOffice, so
that you can bring your own applications with you and use them on any
computer from the flash drive.

Is it possible to install MS Word on a flash drive and run it from there on
a host computer?

 

[JoAnn Paules]

No

 

[Larry]

Thanks.

What is the difference between these portable programs, like Portable
OpenOffice, and MS Word, that enables the former to be installed and run on
a flash drive?

Larry

 

[Guest]

If MS was designing Word now starting from nothing, then without doubt it
would be designed to run from a flash drive. But Word has been around since
the days when 100 MB hard drives were thought excessive and 5¼" floppies
ruled. We have to live with these legacies because major changes would break
backward compatibility. This may change eventually, but with the high
percentage of licensing limited to a single desktop (and possibly a laptop),
having Word run from a flash drive would not be in MS's best interests.

Terry

 

[Dave Symes]

I'm not being picky Terry, just adding to the info as I remember it from
way back when... Gawd! it was a long time ago.

I remember 10/12 MB Winchester HDs being though of as excessive amounts of
storage when the 5 & 1/4 floppy ruled... A few years ago we dumped loads
of those floppies we'd found in a storage cupboard, the movable disk part
had become stuck to the case... Not that we had anything to read them with
by then. :-(
Tarnation, I think Brain rot has set in... I'm not sure now of the size of
those things, I think it was 320K for single density and 640K for double
density... And before that 8 inch floppies storing 100K.
How things have come on since then...

My reading of the EULA for Word 2007 is... The purchaser has permission to
install on one desktop machine, but not on any other partitions that might
be on that machine.
That purchaser also has permission to install on one portable computer,
providing he/she is the sole owner of both machines.

That's what I've done here, installed and registered on my Desktop, and
also installed and registered with my Laptop, I've not encountered any
complaints or authentication problems from MS updates.

Dave

If MS was designing Word now starting from nothing, then without doubt
it would be designed to run from a flash drive. But Word has been
around since the days when 100 MB hard drives were thought excessive
and 5¼" floppies ruled. We have to live with these legacies because
major changes would break backward compatibility. This may change
eventually, but with the high percentage of licensing limited to a
single desktop (and possibly a laptop), having Word run from a flash
drive would not be in MS's best interests.

--

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

5.25" floppies were 360K and 720K.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Terry Farrell]

That's correct about licensing: you may install a retail copy on both a
desktop and laptop owned by yourself, as long as only one is in use at a
time. So theoretically, if you are mobile using your laptop version, no one
else at home should be using the desktop version.

I clearly remember being horrified in 1998 (when checking all our equipment
for millennium compatibility) finding one central alarm equipment rack had
its software backup going to an 8" floppy! I also remember being insanely
jealous when a colleague of mine purchased a 5 MB hard drive for his BBC
computer whilst I was still loading programs from compact cassette tape
(which sometimes took three or four attempts to load).

Terry

 

[CyberTaz]

Actually, 5.25 floppies started out as single-sided single density @ 180KB &
progressed to single-sided double density @ 360KB then to DS DD @ 720KB & to
DS HD at 1.2MB... However, there were a number of variations in formatted
capacity depending on the operating system.

The fun part was "notching" a single-sided disk so you could actually
read/write to twice what its rated capacity

I also remember that at one time you could "safely" use the same disk in an
Apple IIe that you swapped with a TRS-80... they both wrote to only one side
of the notched disk but they wrote to *opposite* sides.