Using GW on a flash drive

I have a U3 4gb flash drive with the .dat and .exe on it. I messed around with it, and the closest I got to getting it to work on a computer was going to guildwars.com and downloading the client, and cancelling at 1%. I deleted the .dat and .exe from the computer, then used the one on my flash drive and it worked. I haven't yet tried it on the computer I NEED to try it on though, and it's really bitchy about my U3 flash drives and pretends they don't exist. Anyway, help meh?

I occasionally run GW from an external hard drive with a Sata hook up, but I've not tried it on a flash drive. It should work, however if you (like me) happen to hate the software that came on your U3 drive, then go ahead and format it... all of it. I did that on mine and it works MUCh better now - no more trouble with it being recognized anymore. :/

First, go http://www.u3.com/uninstall/
That program completely removes the whole U3 program from your drive making it work like any normal flash drive. With guild wars, try copying the .exe to the drive and running it. Should download all the files and automatically create a .dat and whatever files it needs. Good luck.

It will work. I did it and the only problems that I had was that it can fill up your jumpdrive fairly quickly. Also I had a little bit of lag because of the way that it stored and accesed files.

Guild Wars should be able to run on whatever drive you install it on. That is, if you want to run it from an external drive or Flash drive, just install it there.

When the installation comes up and says Install to: "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars", hit Browse and change C to whatever the drive letter of the external is. Or, if you already have GW copied onto an external/flash drive, just run gw.exe from there. (You could probably take the "Program Files" out of the path too.)
The only problem I can foresee is that the drive letter for the external drive is "dynamic" - it can change if something else if the system is using that letter. Say for instance, if your external drive usually comes up a E: (because you have a hard drive C and an optical drive D) and you install another optical drive which becomes E, then the external will become F. That can be fixed by just running gw.exe from the external again though.

W00t. I got it to work. Beat Gate of Pain during Computer Applications. Heh.

Is it possible to just copy paste all the GW to flash drive, will that work? Or do you need to open up the installer and install it to the drive.

Well, I think you can actually run the exe in your hard drive...let it install for a second, cancel it, remove the small dat file it creates and replace it with your up-to-date one.

That depends upon whether or not GW has been previously installed on the machine. If it's been installed before, there may be registry entries which point to the former installation and things may get muddled (but then "installing" it will fix that). But, if it's a clean install, just running gw.exe from the flash drive should set everything up.

On my computer I have GW installed on the D: drive. If, for example, I format C: and reinstall windows, I simply run gw.exe from the D drive and everything is back to normal very quickly - but I can't exactly recall if there is any "setup" such as GW asking for a path, but at any rate, it works again without any reinstall of GW files.

BTW, I recommend that any reasonably computer savy person split there system into (at least) a C: drive and a D: drive - either by installing two drives or partitioning the main drive. The C: drive/partition only needs to be 20gigs or so, enough to hold the OS, My Documents and a few easily reinstalled apps. Then, mostly everything else gets installed on the D drive - games, mp3s, mpgs, etc.. That way, if something crashes your system and/or you want to reformat C: for what ever reason, there is a lot less concern about backing things up. (Usually, File and Settings Transfer Wizard is enough)
P.s. - I say "reasonably computer savy" because it does no good if you don't know how to change the install paths on apps/games or get your programs to save things to the D drive.