I use Sonar on my home Daw running Win7 (64bit). I understand that I'm not allowed to use the Sonar software on any other computer I might have. So here is my solution and question. I want to purchase and download music creator to an external HDD. Then transport the external HDD with the downloaded but not 'installed' program on it to my studio up the country where my older XP laptop is and install it there when connected. I plan to leave it there and only use it with the XP laptop but I will need to install it to the external, as well as run it from there as the laptop has very limited HDD room, and it is an IDE connection so upgrading the laptop HDD is limited indeed. There is no internet connection there either. Is this possible and are there any hoops I need to jump through to make it work? Any advice or help will be greatly appreciated!!

You are allowed to install Cakewalk DAWs on more than one computer as long as only one computer is in use at a time.
 
Installing either SONAR or MC on an external drive and then connecting the hard drive to another computer will not work because the other computer will not have the necessary registry entries. In order to run a Cakewalk DAW on a PC, the DAW must be installed on the PC. It does not matter if it is installed on an internal or external drive although I would attempt to install at least the program on the system drive.
 
No current Cakewalk DAW will run on XP. The last version of SONAR that would run on XP was X2 but not X2a. The last version of MC that would run on XP was MC6 but not MC6T. The PC would have to be upgraded to at least Vista which is no longer supported or tested, or Win7, the oldest supported OS. An older version of SONAR or MC would be the easiest solution, if you have one.

Once again Scook, I thank you for your insight! So, if I upgraded the laptops OS to Win7, and only 'downloaded MC, but didn't actually 'install' it until connected to the laptop, and dedicated the use of the ext HDD to the laptop only it should work? Thanks again for your patience!

 Still not sure why you would not want to use your existing SONAR license.
 
MC7 uses the same authentication process as SONAR. This means you will either need to install using C3 on the laptop or after installing on a machine not connected to the internet, you will have to perform an offline authentication. See the bottom of
http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Music%20Creator%207&language=3&help=Introduction.27.html for information about the activation process.
 

Thanks again for the reply and link to help! The idea for the MC on the laptop is to leave it up the country where band members can use it at their convienience for collaboration. My sonar will be in use hundreds of miles away at home. They can record and mix then forward it to us to mix additional tracks to. (That is my intention anyway) this is currently being done using Audacity but functionality is so much cleaner with the cakewalk software. With the MC at less than $30 and with the laptop and ext HDD collecting dust, if I can make this work it will be quite feasible. The lack of Internet access period is growing to be my main concern now.

for an offline lappy/computer, you can use the off line authentication process or simply bring the computer to an internet location and authenticate the install....then carry it back to the woods.... you'll be good from that point on.

Thanks guitar! Ats what I needed to know!!