I wanto learn to make portables

Have you ever read a detective novel? Or played a computer game where you have to collect clues to solve a mystery? That's what it's like to make an application portable. If someone else has done the detective work and written up a step by step instruction, you might be able to follow it... but most applications are very different from one another in subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. So setting out to make something portable that no one else has played with requires detective work.

If you'd like a bit of help getting started, see how many of those questions you can answer, and provide the answers to us. One to start with is "What is the name of the program?" If we know which program you are talking about, we might be able to look at it and come up with something more specific. (I assume that you would be interested in learning how to do it, rather than having someone do it for you?)

In the quote, another question was asked, "Does it store its settings in the registry." Do you know what the registry is? Have you ever looked there? (I'm not trying to be insulting, just asking for information.) If not, that might be something to start with. There are resources on the Internet about the registry in general (Google is your friend). It's not a huge amount of magic; programs store snippets of data in the registry, and from time to time (like when they start up the next time) read it back again. The question is what bits of information does it store and (b) where in the registry, which is quite large.

If the program "remembers" some things, so that when you start it you don't have to enter everything all over again, you can be sure it is saving those things somewhere. The most likely place is in the registry; another place is in one or more text files somewhere on the computer. The task is to figure that out. Regshot is one way; you run it before you install a program, then you install and run the program at least once, and then you run Regshot a second time; it compares the first and second "shots" and tells you which things the program changed, in the registry and, if you set it, among other files on the computer. This can give you a lot of clues about what is needed to make the program portable. It might even show that the program is already portable.

Another question is what files on the computer does the program need in order to run? If you copy some files to your USB drive but miss a couple that the program hid away somewhere, the program won't run when you get to a computer that doesn't have them. These files might not get changed often, so the only time regshot will list them is comparing before and after the program is installed and run for the first time. (There are other tools that can help you find all the files if, say, you already have the program installed and don't want to uninstall it.)

As for the possibility of startup options for your program that might make it more portable, again, you have to do some detective work. Sometimes those options are listed in the program's help pages. Sometimes you have to hunt around on the program's web site, or ask in a support forum somewhere.

How does that sound for a place to start? If you are stuck on part of that, let us know the first part that causes trouble or is confusing. If you get all the way through and think you have found a list of all the files your program needs, and all the places it wants to store information, then let us know and we'll work on the next step.