Copying programs onto CD's

Say I wanted to copy a program onto a CD to give to someone else so that they could install it, well I'm wondering how it would work.

Is it just a matter of me copying the entire program folder onto the CD? Because I know when you install a program from a CD there is usually a setup.exe file which you start with, and this installs the program for you. But in the folders of my programs now, on my computer, there is no setup.exe file. So if I just copied the folder to a CD, would the person on the other end be able to install the program?

Or can it not be done without copying from the original CD that the program was on?

Sometimes programs have a .bat file that kicks off some setup process.

Regardless, you need to make sure that the CD (If you're copying from one) doesn't have any copy protection on it and if it does try to find software that will avoid it.

Copying the install files themselves (setup.exe, etc. etc.) would be the best way. Copying a folder full of already-installed-files to a CD might miss some things, like registry keys the program made, or DLLs it installed somewhere in your Windows folder, or shared files it put in c:\Program Files\Common Files\, and you also miss out on start-menu entries and stuff that it made. There are all kinds of things you might miss. Just copying c:\Program Files\someprogram to a CD will work with some programs, but not with all.

The thing is I don't have the setup files for some of the programs I want to copy because I installed them from a cd which I no longer have :p

I guess I can just try and put them on a cd as they are and see what happens when the person tries to install them. Thanks for your replies :)

If you have lost the setup files, then it's a case of trial and error.

As Unne said, some of them might work, and some of them might not work.