General Discussion

A while back I saw sites on eBay "selling" USB drives with your software pre-installed. In fact, I found your site because I plugged the words on those pages into Google and your pages came up near the top.

It has been a while since I had even looked on eBay for your products since I figure it was a waste of money and time after I found your site. However, it has been nagging me many months now regarding HOW those people could be selling those USB drives with your software on it. On their site I don't recall any links to Portableapps.com, that is why I used Google.

If I recall, they were selling the 512 Meg USB drives for something like $25 or $29.00. They DID say the software was included FREE, but after seeing 512 Meg drives at Tiger Direct for $10.00, it seems less free than FREE.

I'm working on a guide/FAQ for newbies. Hopefully that'll reduce the amount of questions we get.

A taste (may be revised later):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I) Introduction/FAQ
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This guide is meant to answer many of the questions that often come from those
new to portable applications and external drives and reference for all who enjoy
using portable apps.

---------
* FAQ *
---------

Q. What does "portable" mean?

What does the launcher do and why do I want to launch the app from that instead of directly launching the program?

My home computer doesn't mount removable devices. It loads USB Mass Storage Device drivers, but I have to use Computer Management to mount them, and it mounts them as local disks, and I have to open them via CM because Explorer doesn't acknowledge their existence. It has no problem with my external HD.

Hey everyone,

Just thought that I'd share with the people that didn't already know about a fantastic portable app, StrokeIt Portable. StrokeIt is free for personal use and is a highly customisable mouse gesture program with a very small footprint. One of the forum members 'tpr' has made a nsi launcher to make this excellent program portable and it works flawlessly.

You can customise gestures for individual progams to perform certain functions, have global functions for all programs or both. I've set it up with portable firefox and thunderbird to complete basically all the essential fuctions, and now i feel naked without it. I now use it all the time with Corel and Photoshop and its the most effective program to improve efficeny i've used.

Right now I don`t travel. I just use them on my own computer. What`s the point?

I never knowed the sense of an "installation" for apps like firefox, thunderbird... Is it really necessary? NO!

The adventages of portable software are obvious:
- No registery entrys.
- If I want to travel at some day I can compress and copy my software very fast and do that.
- I have a better overview what the program is doing. All folders have a good overview and it`s not unsorted no files in other dirs. All personal settings and files are stored.
- If I need to format and reinstall my system I can just continue using my apps without any problems. (I have multiple partitions and wihout portable software I had some troube before finding my personal settings folder and so on.)

when trying to run gaim i receive the error mssg. The dynamic link library intl.dll could not be found in the specified path E:\PortableApps\GaimPortable\App\gaim;,;c:\WINNT\system32;C:\\WINNT\system;C:\WINNT;C:\WINNT\system32;C:\WINNT;C:\WINNT\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem\;;C:\PROGA~1\PROTEC~1.

then another error...

Error loading gtkgaim.dll.
Error (126) The specified module could not be found.
This probably means that the GTK+ can't be found.

Thanks for any tips.

My OS is server 2000

Hello,

I intalled the application on my one gig usb drive. (Currently using windows 2000 advanced server)
I checked Device Manager and I indeed do have enhanced usb 2.0 support. (intel usb2 enhanced host controller)

I click on the StartPortableApps.exe (using usb drive E:) and nothing happens.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

I have a few 2 portable apps that require other exes in order to run. These programs are Portable Cleaner and PowerDefragmenter GUI with Contig. I would like to hide the CCleaner exe and only show the Portable CCleaner exe. I also want to hide the Contig file from showing up on the Portable Apps menu. Is there anyway to fix this? I would also like to know if it is possible to change the name of the app in the menu. This is beause PowerDefragmenter's desription calls it Setup Fatory 6.0 Runtime. I would like to change that to PowerDefragmenter.

It is an extension called Firefly it adds a filemanager to Firefox Portable (much like Konqueror). You can open files with other portable software!!! Like when I tried to open a Presentation with OpenOffice Impress Portable via Firefly it worked, also this works with opening Word Docs and other doc formats with OpenOffice Writer Portable (not sure about AbiWord Portable though).

But here is the link to this wonderful extension! https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3076/