Portable Programs aka portable apps

[NomoneyNohoney]

Every now and then, there are passing mentions on here of 'portable apps', but as far as I can see, there's not been a specific explanation or recommendation regarding them. For that reason, I'd like to try and explain my understanding, in case it benefit anyone in the future.

You have normal 'mainstream' apps or programs, which you install to your computer's hard drive, they sit there until called upon for use, and they take up space every day. Comforting to have, but not necessarily used very often.
Portable apps, are programs which can be loaded as required, run, and when closed down, they and their execution files are removed from your computer, leaving just the data that you've saved.

Portable apps are exactly that: portable. I carry in a corner of my wallet a small USB stick (doesn't everybody?) which has all sorts of useful programs. As long as I have my wallet with me I can plug that USB drive into a computer, and run the programs from there without installation. It's got utilities to help with computer repairs or maintenance, for when things go wrong (including stuff on the main computer hard drive) plus I carry programs which I use but may not be around when on a strange computer, or locked out from internet access. It is my portable toolkit. Once it was on my key-ring, but it's ended up in my wallet nowadays.

I use a 16 gB USB drive, but think very soon I will need to increase to 32 gB as I'm running short on space. When its as simple as loading a program to a flash drive, 'just in case', then there's not a lot to prevent this hoarding.

There are 'portable apps' and there is also a website called 'portableapps.com' which should have everything you need.

Plug a formatted USB flash drive into your computer, and browse to 'portable apps.com' The left-hand tab is 'download', so if you download that file, you can install to your USB drive a launcher, which will be how you access your portable apps or programs. Once that's downloaded and installed, then you can access all their portable, legal programs, from their apps store, to load on your portable USB drive.
Open the portable apps.com Apps tab, and there are lots of programs to choose from.
As mentioned, primarily I intended my drive to be a repair or recovery utility, so I'd recommend you to see what apps sound useful to you.

My personal list of useful stuff includes:-

Notepad2 Portable - Simple, lightweight text editor
PortableApps.com Installer - the easy way to package portable apps
PortableApps.com Launcher - make apps portable without writing code
IrfanView Portable (Freeware) - lightweight graphic viewer
FastStone Image Viewer Portable (Freeware) - view, organize and convert images
XnView Portable (Freeware) - view, organize and convert photos
Free Download Manager Portable - download manager and optimizer
Google Chrome Portable (Freeware) - fast, simple, themeable browser
Iron Portable - advanced web browser
Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition - the award-winning web browser that's safe and secure
Opera, Portable Edition (Freeware) - lightweight, customizable browser (which has a VPN included I think)
qBittorrent Portable - lightweight bittorrent client
Audacity Portable - A simple audio editor and recorder
Media Player Classic - Black Edition (MPC-BE) Portable - Lightweight media player
VLC Media Player Portable - An easy to use media player that plays many formats
calibre Portable - ebook manager and viewer
Sumatra PDF Portable - PDF, Comic Book, and E-book Reader
Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition (Address Book) - Email client's full featured address book
Password Safe Portable - Secure password manager
VeraCrypt Portable - free disk encryption
CrystalDiskInfo Portable - disk health monitoring tool
Explorer++Portable - multi-tab file manager
FreeCommander Portable (Freeware) - easy-to-use windows file manager
HWiNFO Portable (Freeware) - software/hardware info
Q-Dir Portable (Freeware) - quad pane file manager
Rufus Portable - format and create bootable USB drives
TeamViewer Portable (Freeware) - remote PC support and screen-sharing
TreeSize Free Portable (Freeware) - disk usage analyzer and cleanup tool

Those are all available from the portable apps website: the downloads end in *.paf, indicating they will integrate into the portable apps launcher and file system without problems.
There are other websites which have portable apps available, portableappz.blogspot.com, for example, but I'll leave you to search and discover those. Try and find files with a .paf extension, and life should be good.

I have a few other apps that I've collected and run on this platform, which include
MS Word )
MS Excel ) Early portable apps which can be probably better replaced with one of the portable office suites, eg:
Apache OpenOffice Portable - word processor, spreadsheet, presentations with Microsoft compatibility or
Libre Office Portable.

Recuva Portable for Windows
EASEUS Partition Master
AOMEI Partition Assistant

All of these apps from portable apps.com sit on my flash drive, and can be plugged into a computer for immediate use. They can all update to latest versions, and once they have been used, just close them down and they back out and shut down without making any changes to your hard drive, your registry or whatever. They are usually pared down versions of main apps, so they don't carry much bloatware, they're quick and easy to get to run, and can be a lifesaver when needed.
There are portabilized versions of other programs such as Photoshop on the web, but these are not authorised or approved for use - I'm just mentioning that (apparently) they exist.

Hope that is of help to someone.

[Breelander]

Every now and then, there are passing mentions on here of 'portable apps', but as far as I can see, there's not been a specific explanation or recommendation regarding them.....

Excellent description of use and recommendations. I use many of the same apps from PortableApps.com myself. In particular, almost all my PCs run the Portable Apps versions LibreOffice and Audacity (a great audio editor). There is no reason why a portable app has to be moved around, it can equally well be used as a permanent install.

The explanation part could do with a bit of expansion though. There are a few apps that are portable anyway, they are designed to not require the registry for storing any of their settings or data. Their settings will be saved to a .ini file. The majority of useful apps would normally require a full install though and their own entries in the registry.

What PortableApps.com does is create an environment where as far as the app is concerned it appears to be able to read from and write to the registry as normal, but in reality is using data held in a user data folder in the portable app's folder. This gets loaded when the app is run, and is saved when the app closes. The app itself is the full version and can do everything it could do with a conventional install.

[NomoneyNohoney]

Nice clarification: thank you.

I mentioned that the flash drive used to be on my key-ring but now its in my wallet, and overlooked explaining why.

More than once, I used the drive and then left my drive in the back of the computer I'd been working on, completely forgetting to retrieve it.
A misplaced USB drive is one thing: a misplaced USB drive complete with car and house keys is much more of a problem!

[Alaric]

What PortableApps.com does is create an environment where as far as the app is concerned it appears to be able to read from and write to the registry as normal, but in reality is using data held in a user data folder in the portable app's folder. This gets loaded when the app is run, and is saved when the app closes. The app itself is the full version and can do everything it could do with a conventional install.

In its way, that's going back to the 1980s way of using computers that didn't have internal disks. You would insert a removable disk and run the program off that.

[AF62]

I carry in a corner of my wallet a small USB stick (doesn't everybody?)

Err… no!

A mobile phone with access to all my electronic data at home and any applications I need then yes, but not a USB stick.

I can plug that USB drive into a computer, and run the programs from there without installation. It's got utilities to help with computer repairs or maintenance, for when things go wrong (including stuff on the main computer hard drive) plus I carry programs which I use but may not be around when on a strange computer, or locked out from internet access.

That’s very nice of you, but personally I try and avoid helping with computer repairs or maintenance as I have found it to be a very slippery slope - for *very* close elderly relatives then perhaps, but anyone else - nope.

And if it’s a “strange computer” that allows you to plug in a USB stick and run executable files

Goodness knows what nasties are lurking on it so the thought of subsequently putting that USB stick anywhere near any PC I cared about afterwards gives me shivers.

The practical use I do put portable apps to is on my own PC with applications that I might use once in a blue moon and don’t want to install and then uninstall after that one job. So download, use, delete, and then re-download if I ever needed it again.

[Breelander]

...The practical use I do put portable apps to is on my own PC with applications that I might use once in a blue moon and don’t want to install and then uninstall after that one job. So download, use, delete, and then re-download if I ever needed it again.

I do that too, but these days I find it's really useful for long term installs of my most used apps on a newly installed Windows. Just copy over my Portable Apps folder and the job's done....

[NomoneyNohoney]

I didn't really want to complicate things too much, but I feel drawn to further commenting!

I usually partition my C-drive so that I have a D drive too, which is much smaller. I also copy my Portable Apps straight over there and many times use a portable app, that resides on my hard drive, same as AF62 and Bree mention. My feeling is, if something borks my C-drive, the D drive may well be still useful.

Ii is also relatively easy to "portablize" somebody else's portable app onto the 'portable apps' .paf format. Just copy the directory structure of a .paf file, manually paste it into place, and then 'search for installed apps' to update the launcher. (I just checked to make sure my memory was right : App/Data/Other folders, plus .exe file and help.html. The first app folder I checked, directory list & print pro.exe, just had an exe file there, so maybe its simpler than I recall.)

Portable apps are really useful