When changing hardware or installing an OS you lose registry files that cause games to break, but some digital distributions like Steam update these files when you launch games for the first time in a new configuration.

GOG should consider implementing this type of feature as well. GOG's file integrity doesn't seem to fix this issue currently. I'm assuming this issue only really applies to people installing games on secondary hard drives.

On a side note, GOG Galaxy asks for UAC for every game update which is really annoying, maybe launching GOG Galaxy as UAC solves the problem, I didn't check yet.

Hope we see some fixes. GOG is awesome, but GOG Galaxy still has a lot of skeletons in the closet and seeing some games coming out with online only LAN is really disappointing.

Just as a fyi, like most internet support forums, we're customer driven here with little to no staff interaction.

Best bet would be to post this in the development sticky at the top of the forums. Remember stickies are good. Obey the stickies:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_galaxy_official_discussion_thread

As to the UAC issue, a quick google suggests going into properties and unchecking "ran as admin" on Galaxy. Most of those threads are old so maybe someone can double check me on this.

Thanks, thought I might have been posting in the wrong area.

One other solution, don't keep everything installed all the time? I can for instance install most smaller games from here in but a few seconds, probably less time than it takes to find the shortcut in all the installed stuff. Having everything installed all the time is just a recipe for issues if you programs are anything more than portable.

As for UAC, again, old school I know but, install everything outside Windows folders - should avoid most of the UAC issues, oh hang on your using Galaxy, not sure if this is even possible there but could try it. Me I have several folders on root of C out of the way of Program Files and such nasty areas which break mods and saves and such like.

But I like keeping everything installed all the time. Who knows when I;m playing Tomb Raider, I may have a craving to play Mini Metro instead.....

:)

Good tip, My games are installed at E:\GOG Games so I think I'm good.

Its not just about that. I don't use Galaxy, and install my games on my second drive (as its alot bigger.) Most work fine though a few like Simon 3D use reg entries. Meaning unless I back these up I can't launch the game without re-installing it to my second drive. And in this day and age of most people having more than one drive, you'd of thought GOG would of thought about this.

You sure about this? Afaik Steam only does it when the game is lauched the first time directly after install. I also cannot imagine how Steam should figure out if you installed a new hardware or OS. Anyway: if you use Galaxy and you want to restore the original install state you can just chose the verify/repair game option from withni Galaxy (basically the same as the "validate game files" option in Steam. This should also make sure you have all your registry keys intact. UAC is annoying as hell. First thing I turn off on every windows computer. Never had any problems with it afterwards :)

This is why you don't keep everything installed. Keep the installer files and back these up. They are much smaller than the installed version hence a big saving in disk space. And they have all the necessary bits to install and setup such as reg entries, directx, c++ ext, etc. Hence they are far more usable across systems. Not to mention that if you do any kind of modding it always recommends a fresh install of the game. There really isn't any benefit to keeping all your apps installed all the time.

And I have it on the highest setting... and rarely ever see it.

That's interesting. Wasn't highest setting not supposed to mean that windows would ask you if you really want to do this whener you try to launch ANY application? (I remember having seen such behaviour on a vista PC once).

Ah - thanks for the explanation, did not know that. (But I still will keep it turned off for me anyway).

I don't know about the games you have tested, but in the past week I installed about 300 gigs worth of games to my laptop through the Galaxy-client and then copied them to my primary gaming PC's multiple partitions, where I used the client's Scan and import folders function to integrate the games to it.

Only the first Mount & Blade and two first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games failed to be recognized at all, the rest were added just fine although many of them needed to be manually set to use the latest version to get rid of the "unknow version" tag. But that didn't require downloading much more data, with less than 200 megabytes the version numbers were restored and even the PunkBuster got installed, so I would say that the client is quite capable of getting the previously installed games to work on a new computer.

Now I just need to copy the games to a third computer and figure out the registry keys needed to get them to run manually, as then I can just let the client to update any installed game and just archive the installation folders whenever I wish to make a new backup of those games.

Changing hardware doesn't do anything to (games) registry files.

I've the impression that I've seen this topîc before. Anyway this sounds like some personal OCD issue - for some reason you want a shitload of games installed at once.
I'd rather have my installers offline available than rely on an external service (Steam) to update installed games.