The reason I ask is that Thunderbird is very groggy when I load it from a thumb drive -- so much so that it's almost unusable.
So, I figured, I have Thunderbird on my laptop and desktop, and I just want the profiles to stay in sync, so why don't I just have a profile on the thumb drive? Well, even when I use thunderbird on my computer, pointing to the portable profile, it's just as slow.
I didn't install the portable apps suite and I don't know if this is necessary to make this program run faster. If the issue is too many emails, I wonder if I can archive some of them on my computer, keep the most recent (
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The reason it's slow is because you're using it on a slower drive. It's the profile that causes it, not where you run Thunderbird from. The only decent solution is to buy a faster drive. Remember there's a 50x speed difference between a good, well-tuned USB2 flash drive and a bad one. You can't always tell the difference from the 'specs' they list since those are best-case scenarios for large files, not lots of small writes as apps like Thunderbird do.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
That's interesting. I have a tiny, nondescript, 4g flash drive and I don't even know if it's USB2. Under properties, it says it can't be used for readyboost. I don't know if that's an indicator of anything. It's formatted fat32 and it's sharing space between windows portable apps and a linux live disk. What do you recommend I do to tune up my flash drive? Should I consider buying a new one entirely? Thanks for the advice.
If a drive is too slow for ReadyBoost, it's gonna be slow running portable software on it.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I see. So then it's a hardware problem and I need to upgrade my drive. Is this correct?
OK, I went and got a thumb new thumb drive and this solved the problem. Now the portable app is working just fine.
I tried having my browser (SrWare Iron) on my thumb drive but this wasn't working before, either. I'm thinking of trying it again on this drive, but I'm wondering if there isn't a way to cache files on my hard drive instead of the thumb.
For instance, I want to keep my extensions, settings and bookmarks on the thumb drive, but I don't need to save my cache or history. Can I run a portable browser that stores temp files on the hard drive, and then either leaves them there or dumps them when you close the browser?
Similarly, I'm feeding my blog into Thunderbird and once I read those RSS entries, I don't need them cached for next time I open Thunderbird.
I guess this goes back to my original question: can you run a native/portable hybrid?
this depends on what you mean by archived. If you export mails and do not have them any more in the mail folder, then you do not have them, you have to import them back again.
So far I ca imagine that it is possible to import from stick only part of the mail folder, however this will definitely lead to problems. The folders with relatively small files under the name of the mail account have to be exactly present and not changed as they keep track of mails already read and downloaded etc.
If you keep mails in local folders (with subfolders etc) then this should also not be broken into parts.
You could arrange for other main folders like local folders, trynsfer mails there and leave those out.
But this is lot of work, by that time you copy the whole mail folder anyway.
To run local thunderbird with profile on the stick is possible, but then it would be better when the usb drive does not change the drive letter otherwise TB will search for something non existing.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
isn't there a setting you can set to 0 or to not save if you are not wanting to have them take up space anywhere?
Don't be an uberPr∅. They are stinky.
I would be fine with it simply not creating a cache at all, if this was possible. I was able to find a solution to this problem, for Google Chrome, or SrWare Iron, which is what I use.
If you create a shortcut to Chrome and add this flag to the command:
C:\Program Files (x86)\SRWare Iron\Iron.exe --disk-cache-dir="c:\users\Me\Temp"
Then this will start caching in that temp directory. So theoretically, I could run a portable copy of Chrome/Iron with flags and it would work there, too. Also, I could run Thunderbird with flags to move its cache as well, presumably.
Well the problem with this solution is that you're not running the program exe when you're running PortableApps versions of programs, you're running the exe that starts up the other one in portable mode. I have tried pointing a shortcut to portable Iron (and thunderbird, trying the --profilemanager flag) and it doesn't work.
I hope I haven't gone too far off topic, but does anyone have a workaround for this? Thanks.
Actually, Portable Firefox is way better than portable Iron, and cache is set to 0 by default. Thanks.
I have one more question: How do you get Portable Thunderbird to link to portable Firefox by default? If I click a link, I would like it to open in Portable Firefox. Thanks!
https://portableapps.com/node/31442#comment-191724