AlbertPacino
Skilled
About
This site is dedicated to the collection and cataloguing of freeware that can be extracted to any directory and run independently without prior installation. These can be carried around on a memory stick / USB flash drive, or copied / migrated from PC to PC via simple copying of files. Hence the term portable freeware.
Some freeware already come in the form of a ZIP file, ready to be extracted and run from any directory. Others require an extraction procedure, which could be as simple as installing them, extracting the necessary files, and uninstalling them again.
You could do the extraction yourself, or you could download one of the free Portable Freeware Collection ZIP packages, where the freeware is already extracted to their respective directories and ready to be run. All you need to do is to use the search engine on this website to obtain the location (volume + directory + executable) for a particular freeware, and you can immediately launch the relevant EXE files.
Unfortunately, not all freeware can be extracted this way. Some freeware still rely on hocus-pocus in their SETUP.EXE (write special registry keys, install nifty COM objects etc.) in order to function properly. These non-portable freeware will not be listed in our database. Hopefully we will see fewer of them in time to come if enough people become concerned about portability.
Definition of "portable"
The term "portable" means different things to different people. My definition of "portable" is:
- It must be able to run from any directory you dump it in.
Some excellent freeware are optimized for memory stick / USB flash drive operation, but they must be installed in a particular directory for proper operation (eg. Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird). Currently, I will list such applications with a disclaimer in the application description that they are location-dependent. They will also not be included in any of the Portable Freeware Collection ZIP packages. - Its use of the Windows registry (if any) must not be detrimental to its operation.
Many freeware use the Windows registry to store their settings. As long as their use of the Windows registry does not significantly affect their functionality when run on another machine (eg. storing the last accessed directory, storing the current window position), I will not penalize against them. However, if the use of the Windows registry to store application settings does affect an application's operation meaningfully (eg. how many times do you want to tell you text editor that you want to use spaces instead of tabs), then I will not include them in the database. - It must not rely on any particular platform runtimes.
Some examples of platform runtimes are Visual Basic, .Net and Java. I know this is a controversial issue for many, but for the time being, I will only include pure Win32 apps in the database. I will further assume that certain common Windows components are already installed (eg. HTMLHelp, Internet Explorer), so I do not consider them to be significant dependencies.
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