Calm Down. I just wanted to grab your attention. The programs I am talking about are programs that you can use even without first installing from the usual setup program. To use these programs, you just have to copy the program files to your desired folder, and depending on the program, configure a few settings.
So why would you want to do this? There are many good reasons and here are some of them:
- You have no administrative rights to install additional programs to the system.
- You want to avoid the addition of items to your system registry, the creation of unwanted shortcuts in your program menu or desktop, and file associations to keep your system from becoming slow and cluttered.
- You want to run newer versions of a program without having to uninstall earlier versions. This is especially useful if you are like me who needs to test different program versions.
- You want to put the program in a portable medium such as a USB drive and run the program on another computer. Some site may already provide you portable applications but sometimes the provided versions are not the latest. Why wait for them to release a portable version if you can do it yourself?
- You need to perform a network installation.
- Your organization has set rules and policies that prevent you from installing new programs to your system.
- The standard installation method fails.
Without further ado, here is the list. You can click on each listed program to see how to set it up before you use it.
- NetBeans
- OpenOffice
- apache-tomcat
- Editix
- mutorrent
- notepad++
- The Regulator
- Winmerge
This is an expanding list so please come back regularly to see additional programs. If you know other useful programs that can be made portable, please inform me by leaving a comment on this article.