Revision as of 14:28, 22 June 2019

mIRC Installation

There are multiple type of installations of mIRC that can be done.

There are two main installation types, the 'old', which is how mIRC used to install in the past, and the 'new', which is how mIRC is now installing.

Old type

Before, and because windows itself wasn't really pushing mutli-user installation of program, mIRC used to place all the files in the same folder you selected. So mirc.ini mirc.exe, the help file, the scripts etc, everything was inside one main folder.

New type

Then, multi-users was added in Windows and quickly, it was designed so that programs would be typically installed to 'Program files', which cannot be written to unless you have admin rights, while the different settings files would be placed in a different folder, which doesn't require admin rights. Not only this is more organized, from the OS's point of view, but it ensures program can run correctly without having to take care of write permissions.

Some people still prefer the old install type with all the files in the same folder, it is possible to get mIRC to do such an installation: if you place a mirc.ini file inside the folder you are installing to, the mIRC installer will do an old type installation.

Note: The same applies for mirc.exe once installed, if you run mirc.exe inside a folder with a mirc.ini file, it will use that file as mirc.ini and won't store settings in the appropriate location (appdata)

Portable

A portable installation will make an old type installation and will prevent mIRC from storing information on the machine, to use mIRC from an usb stick for example. mIRC won't use the registry to store your license or information about the 30day trial as well as registering mIRC as the application to use for irc:// url

Installing/Upgrading

If you're starting with mIRC or don't want to do anything, just do a normal install, the new type, so just run the installer once you have downloaded it.

The default folder for installation should be something like C:\Program Files (x86)\, if you installed mIRC previously on the machine, it's possible for this value to be different.

If mIRC recognizes the folder as a mIRC folder, it will warn you and select the 'upgrade' option, which only update the .exe and the help file, basically.

Others options are "full", which is the default for a first installation, or "custom" where you can select which components to install.

Command line