Management of PC installing games

[andwan0]

Does anyone know a good system for management of installed PC games? I don't have a large hard disk and nowaday games are so big (eg. CoD4 takes 10GB, Oblivion... Fallout 3, and more). I find myself uninstalling games and then reinstalling them again. And then when Windows XP goes slow I have a habit of reformating and clean install Windows XP. This ofcourse leads to long processes of reinstalling games.

There's a program called InstallRite that is just a file/registry monitor. I usually monitor the registry after an installation of a game and extract/export the relevant registry key lines. I have external backing storage so whenever I ran out of space I move a big game, etc. Fallout 3 to the backing storage. If something happened to Windows XP and I had to reformat & reinstall then I can just import the registry file of that game, and copy the game folder back into C:\Program Files\, etc. This seems to work for most games.

Am curious if there's other better easier ways... How do you do yours?

[x-Shadow-x]

I have a seperate partition for my games, whenever I install a new game, it goes straight to that game partition. I can then export the key and save it in the game dir for when I repartition. If you are using steam, then there is no need to export a key.

[byteme8bit]

Does anyone know a good system for management of installed PC games? I don't have a large hard disk and nowaday games are so big (eg. CoD4 takes 10GB, Oblivion... Fallout 3, and more). I find myself uninstalling games and then reinstalling them again. And then when Windows XP goes slow I have a habit of reformating and clean install Windows XP. This ofcourse leads to long processes of reinstalling games.

There's a program called InstallRite that is just a file/registry monitor. I usually monitor the registry after an installation of a game and extract/export the relevant registry key lines. I have external backing storage so whenever I ran out of space I move a big game, etc. Fallout 3 to the backing storage. If something happened to Windows XP and I had to reformat & reinstall then I can just import the registry file of that game, and copy the game folder back into C:\Program Files\, etc. This seems to work for most games.

Am curious if there's other better easier ways... How do you do yours?

My setup is a 32gb SSD which holds my OS and some misc programs I use frequently. I have a 1TB partitioned into a 400gb for Media (music/videos) 300gb for Games and currently have ~220gb unallocated for future necessary use. I also have a 640gb notebook drive that I have all of my installer files scripts and programs that do not fit onto my 32gb SSD.

Having a drive dedicated to your OS prevents the problem of losing games or other programs on crash. I image my SSD every week to have a current back up. I also don't have to reinstall your games each time you reimage your OS.

Hope this helps or gives you an idea of another route to take.

-Byteme8bit