Lose Your Mind Development

I recently received an email about running Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 from a portable drive. I had not considered this during development. But there is nothing in the code that prevents Printer’s Apprentice from running this way.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 is based on the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework. So this needs to be installed on any computer that you want to run the application on. This is covered below.

Here are some steps for setting up Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 from a portable drive. I store applications in an “apps” folder on my drive and use this in the examples. But you can place Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 in any folder on your drive.

So lets get started.

1. If you don’t already have Printer’s Apprentice 8.0, download it from the following URL and install it on your PC.

http://www.loseyourmind.com/zipfiles/prnapp80.zip

2. Download a copy of the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Redistributable Package and save it on your portable drive. This is a single 22 MB download name dotnetfx.exe. If you need to run Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 on a machine that does not have .NET 2.0 installed, you will need to run this first. (Note that Vista already has .NET 2.0 installed on it.)

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Redistributable Package

On my portable drive, I store this in an apps\NET Runtime 2.0 folder. (Click to enlarge.)

3. Then copy the contents of the Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 folder on your PC to your portable drive. Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 is typically found in the following folder.

c:\program files\lose your mind development\printer’s apprentice 8.0

After I have copied PA from my local drive, the portable drive now looks like the screenshot below. (Click to enlarge.) Make sure you copy all the files and folders in the screenshot.

4. You can now run Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 from the portable drive by double clicking the prnapp.exe file.

The only thing that could cause confusion is the configuration file. It is stored on the local hard drive rather than the portable drive. It is usually in the following file.

\documents and settings\{account}\application data\printer’s apprentice\prnapp.exe.config

This is actually not a bad thing. The main thing that the configuration files stores is the location of the font groups folder. And I’m sure that as you move from PC to PC with your drive, the font groups will likely reside on the local drive instead of your portable drive.

If you have any questions, shoot an email to me at helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.