Is there any advantage to running portable applications rather than their normal equivalents from your hard drive?

July 16, 2006 11:06 PM

Is there any advantage to running portable applications rather than their normal equivalents from your hard drive?

Other than saving HD space, is there any advantage to running portable applications rather than their normal equivalents from your hard drive? I.E., do portable applications tend to have lower than average memory use, etc.?

posted by tnoetz01 to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Um, portability?

I think the reason most people use such portable apps, is that they can have their information (emails, browser favorites and cookies) with them, on all the computers they use.

And, by the way, they tend to be precisely the same applications you would otherwise load on a hard drive, except they keep their configuration information in a file instead of the Windows system registry (if a Windows machine).
posted by curtm at 11:19 PM on July 16, 2006

...which can be a big advantage. You don't have to worry about the programs screwing with the registry or dumping crud in \windows\, you can delete them entirely just by selecting their directory and pressing delete, and if you reinstall windows they're ready to go, no reinstallation necessary. If you want to use them on a different computer, whether permanently or just via a network share, no problem.

I'd go so far as to wish that all programs which could function like this would have the option to.

In fact, what is the justification for putting all the mundane settings in the registry? I can't think of one.
posted by alexei at 11:31 PM on July 16, 2006 [1 favorite]

I like portable apps because they tend not to need installing, or can be installed (say, at home) then moved around. That means I can use Firefox at work without needing admin privs.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 11:34 PM on July 16, 2006

Privacy, perhaps?
posted by pompomtom at 11:40 PM on July 16, 2006

Keeping things synchronised and avoiding duplication would be another issue.

If you access your email from work and home, you may have emails in one place and not the other, or duplicate emails in both places, which can get confusing.

If you use Portable Thunderbird then your emails go with you.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 12:11 AM on July 17, 2006

Just remembered another one -- sharing work between two or more people, or handing work over from one person to another.

If Joe Bloggs has been working on a certain project and has amassed 1,000 emails about it, it can be an absolute nightmare trying to copy/forward the emails to his replacement when he moves, especially in Windows environments where the email system works on usernames and to read Joe's email you have to be logged on as Joe.

It still falls under "portability" I guess but it's another wrinkle.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 12:18 AM on July 17, 2006

Another plus: privacy. I use TrueCrypt to encrypt my USB drive. I can keep my email, browser history, etc. private while I'm using computers in various locations. It's nice to be able to let Firefox always save logins and passwords and know they'll stay private.
posted by owen at 4:26 AM on July 17, 2006

I'm at my friends place and we want to watch a movie. I have a great one on my USB drive but, oh crap, he doesn't have the right player / codec to play it and there's no internet access.

But wait! I have portable VLC on my USB drive as well, along with a couple of small codecs, just in case. I defy you to find a movie file I cannot play! Portably!

Same thing goes for emergency image editing, pdf viewing, mp3 encoding, FTP, or virus scanning.

For me, it's about convenience and being able to macguyver any situation.

Also, I use a TrueCrypt partition to hold sensitive info as well as my current work backups.

Oh, and there's also a copy of the Zombie Survival Guide.
You know, just in case.
posted by utsutsu at 6:54 AM on July 17, 2006 [1 favorite]

In fact, what is the justification for putting all the mundane settings in the registry? I can't think of one.

Seriously. Me neither.
posted by Crotalus at 12:57 PM on July 17, 2006

I was asking about using those apps on your hard drive, not on a USB drive; I already use them there for all the obvious portability and privacy functions. Good point about the registry, though.
posted by tnoetz01 at 2:34 PM on July 17, 2006

Oops, sorry.

Advantages of running "portable" apps off a hard disk drive, are:

1. Speed. If you have an app, like an email program, which saves significant amounts of data, performance will be much better on a hard disk. Writing to flash memory is much slower, by several orders of magnitude.

2. Portability. Even though the program is stored on a hard disk, if you want to move it (and its accompanying data) to another computer, you can just copy the directory in which the app resides. Because it doesn't use the registry, everything< \i> necessary to run that program can be easily moved.

3. Footprint. Due to the use of the registry and system DLLs, regular apps can only be installed using an installation program. Installing and uninstalling "portable" apps is simple and straightforward, and doesn't make your system any more complex and tangled than it already is. Also, many traditional programs require administrative rights to install, which is generally not the case with portable apps.
posted by curtm at 7:51 AM on July 18, 2006