Portable Applications

Good day to all of you and I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. Of course, after the general feasting, for most people it’s now Evacuation day. ((In other, less polite words, you’re taking a dump)) 😉

Now, as to the subject of this posting. I’ve played with portable applications off and on for some time now. For those of you who don’t know, a portable application is one that can be run from a USB thumb drive and doesn’t write to the Windows Registry.

While most people won’t care about something writing to the registry, it is something that advanced computer users and Systems Administrators have to deal with. When you decide to remove a program, either because you don’t want it anymore it it wasn’t what you were looking for, the uninstall program may not completely clear all references from the Windows Registry.

Although Microsoft says this shouldn’t cause a problem, I’ve seen registry files over a gigabyte in size.  All this is, is wasted space. Additionally, if you should want to reinstall a program for some reason, (Say it became corrupted or something), if the registry contains the original settings, the program may not work correctly.

The last time I had this happen was when I had to reinstall a Cisco VPN client that had a failed install. No matter what I did, the damn application wouldn’t work correctly. I ended up searching though the registry and deleting every single reference to Cisco I could find…and there were a LOT of them!

For most people, digging through their registry is a good way of destroying their computers. Even I’ve done it. ((This is why I recommend DriveImage XML for making a brick level backup))

This brings us back to portable applications. There are actually a large number of them including Firefox, Thunderbird and Chrome. You can load them onto the computer directly or run them from a thumb drive.

I’ve started using a suite of applications from PortableApps.com. This suite gives you some basic apps, and there are more that you can download. Installations is a snap. Simply unzip the program to a USB stick or to your hard drive, create a shortcut on your desktop and away you go!

If you want more programs, you can either put them into the apps directory or if it has the .paf.exe extension, you can use the portableApps installer.

I’ve already migrated my Thunderbird email to this tool and deleted the original installation from my system. I used another tool called MozBackup ((Available for free download at jasnapaka.com)) to copy all my email, plugins and settings to the portable version of Thunderbird. I would get this tool anyway just for the ability to backup your Firefox and Thunderbird settings and plugins.

I’ve also loaded the portable versions of OpenOffice although I haven’t yet uninstalled the version I’m using on my desktop. (The portable version is one rev. behind)

Now I’m concentrating on Windows apps since I’m most comfortable with using them. I understand there are versions for people who like to serve as catamites ((Catamites defined)) for Steve Jobs ((Apple Computer)), as well as Linux. I’ll let those of you who use those platforms dig around for them.

As I’ve said, there are a large and surprising number of applications that have been made into portable additions. Here is a short list of some of the more popular programs:

1. Skype
2. Mozilla Firefox
3. Thunderbird
4. Google Chrome
5. Open Office
6. Notepad++ ((A free open source replacement for Windows Notepad))
7. Gimp ((Opensource replacement for Photoshop))

There are literally hundreds of others and I have no doubt more are on the way. People are tired of having applications locked into systems and having to fight broken uninstallers when they remove them.

I hope you will find these tools as useful as I have.

~The Angry Systems Administrator~