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Why do some programs run when even not installed

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Zatrix

Member
Joined
Jun 14, 2004
Location
moving to ohio once 2012 gets closer
Programs like cpu-z and filemon just to name a few dont need to be installed. all you do is double click the .exe and they run and do there thing....

i dont really get how thats even possible. they dont save anything to anywhere from what i can tell.

1. how do you know that they dont save/install anything.

im asking in general, not just those 2 programs but any program like that. how can you tell that there really not installing/saving something?
 
If you don't like it, don't run it. However, being a Visual Basic dabbler, most of the apps I've written have just been simple things to do calculations or something. Unless you actually have a reason to store data, there's no real need to install a 500kb file. I dunno, maybe somebody with real programming experience can give you a better explanation.
 
If cpu-z was to have an installer, what it would do is the following:

1. Put cpu-z.exe on your hard disk.

Done.

Something like the warcraft 3 installer however does the following:
1. put war3.exe on your hard disk.
2. put a bunch of stuff in your registry.
3. put ijl15.dll on your hard disk.
4. put Mss32.dll on your hard disk.
5. put Storm.dll on your hard disk.
6. put WorldEditor.exe on your hard disk.
.
.
.

All an installer does is make this a whole lot less complicated by automating the process, but because cpu-z is so simple, making it less complicated doesn't do anything, hence the lack of an installer. Btw, a dll file is created basically when you cut up an exe into smaller pieces so that you don't just have one giant exe file. This makes updates smaller because they only have to update the relevant parts, and when you load the game it takes less time becuase once again, only the parts needed at startup are loaded.

And, you can't know that a file isn't saving stuff to your computer, you'll just have to trust them. Although you might be able to get an AV program that monitors a program's access to the hard drive, but I am yet to hear of one.
 
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