Dear all,
I am wondering, if it is a good idea or not to put the portable versions of programs like OOo, T-bird, Firefox or others directly on the hard disk of different computers and use them instead of the install-versions.
Together with a stick (where all these program would also reside) this would make synching them all between different machines much easier than with installed versions, since they could all be in the same path together with settings, user files and everything, unlike the installed version.
Would this have any negative effects, like higher resource use or slower start-up or any other detrimental effects?
Thanks for you help and greetings,
tom
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The ones with UPX compression will be slower. You could just decompress them with UPX, that would speed it up a bit (not by too much on a good computer). If you are synching them that will make the usb ones larger and perhaps slower starting up. Personally I use portable apps on my computer.
cowsay Moo
cowthink 'Dude, why are you staring at me.'
I'm actually trying to set up a collection of apps using PortableApps as the base. I can just drag and drop onto a fresh os install to have a quick setup of my primary apps. It also has the benefit of not having too much clutter in the registry. I have not noticed any slowness compared to non-portable counterparts, but that's subjective, I havn't run any benchmarks...
I have a PAM folder off c:\ and put a shortcut to StartPortableApps.exe in the startup folder so they're available from startup.
You can use this as your main copy and refresh your usb drive from your HD to stay in sync.
Well, good question.
I try myself only to use portable applications. The disadventages are that them start slower sometimes.
MISIIM: "You could just decompress them with UPX, that would speed it up a bit." - Can you explain this a bit better? I don`t really get what you mean.
I did always wonder why not all non system (like firefox, thunderbird...) applications are portable by default. Lately I found out the why. If you are on windows xp and working with user rights instant of admin rights for your daily work you have no right to write on c:\programms folder. That`s why them store things to the documents and settings folder. To do it on that way supports better the resticted user rights. For portable software you would have yourself to set write permission to the data folder which seams to be to complicated for "standard users". Guess on that way it`s more easy to support multible users.
But I never got why almost all programms write stuff the the registery.
So I prefer portable software as them never messed up my system until now. It`s more easy to copy it then to usb or to make backups. So if you don`t struggle with user rights and don`t care about the startup time I guess you will like more to use portable apps. But at least it`s up to you.
thanks very much for your comments.
I wasn't so sure, cause I didn't find anything about it anywhere. To have all programs in one folder and to update all other locations from there was exactly my plan
Re uncompressing with upx: how do I know a program is compressed with upx and how would I uncompress it?
Thx,
tom
takes around a half a second running from the hard drive (on my computer anyway, which means it should take less on yours
).
Don't worry about it.
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