Does a portable program, any .exe type file run "faster"/"better" from a USB rather than on the hard drive its being run from.
If a app is on a USB drive and is run from there would it be just as fast if the portable app file was on the desktop (on the hard drive) of the computer the USB was attached to?
I realize the whole convenience of Portable apps is to run from a thumb drive, but i was just wondering about this.
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Also is there any difference between running an App from a thumbdrive or an external hard drive?
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What kind of program would run faster, a program installed and in the registry or a portable version of the same program?
The convenience of not having to install something and just click a .exe is worth it.
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Suppose you are using an App like GIMP a drawing software and you want it to run fast for sketching and rendering, what could you do to optimize its performance.
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I think that depends heavily on the application and on the thumb drive.
Take for example a typical run-of-the-mill inexpensive thumb drive, like one of the cheaper Sandisk Cruzers or Kingston Data Travelers.
With an app like CoolPlayer+ you may not notice any difference. It's light-wieght enough that it loads pretty much instantly and runs fine.
A heavier app that loads in many small pieces like Gimp is very slow to load, but may run okay once fully loaded.
And a heavier app that relies on lots of disk access like Thunderbird is both slow to load and runs very slowly.
Contrast that with a fast thumb drive like a Supertalent RC8 (which is basically an SSD in thumb drive format, and very expensive). Apps can load and run much faster on such a drive.
And there is a wide gulf in between, so it's a very difficult question to answer.
FWIW: I know of no way to optimize Gimp for use on a cheap thumb drive. There are things you can do with some programs (like turning off caching in Firefox Portable) and in many cases those things have already been done for you by the Portable Apps Team.
thank you! I had no idea the quality of thumb drive was an issue,
If for certain programs it runs slower, but not noticeably like with coolPlayer+ i can understand and will probably leave that on the thumb,
Thanks for the speedy reply this helps a lot, i generally just wanted to know if the location of the app folder/files affected anything at all!
and so it does, greatly. i will keep heavily used and complex portable apps on my laptop from now on.