Portable Applications (back to the old DOS days)

Remember those college days where they had those PCI cards that froze the PC’s configuration and restores it whenever you rebooted them? (It was a great thing for IT support guys, where students couldn’t mess up the system). The lab sys admin also uninstalled most of the games from those machines (not that MS games were any good but it did help kill time).

Remember too how we would circumnavigate this problem by playing old DOS games off a diskette? Well I’m sure that this was when it dawned on many of us that there was something very cool about the DOS. By simply PKARC -ing a program’s directory and unarc-ing it and finding the executable we were set to go. Heck sometimes the programs didn’t even care where it ran from. There was no need to find the installer and everything worked as long as they were kept in their own directory.

Now with flash memory being cheap as disposable diapers (well not really but near), the concept of a portable appication is returning us back to the good old days of DOS by making applications standalone and install-less.

I’ve develop quite a liking for a couple of these programs simply because they function like their full blown installed variant but packaged smaller. In fact I download them, place them in a their own directory in another partition and send a shortcut to the desktop saving both time (especially when you’ve re-formatted your OS partition) and space. They also don’t bog down the registry.

Here are some apps that I highly recommend.

1) Opera USB
2) Firefox USB
3) Firefax PDF Reader
3) Portable ClamWin Antivirus
4) µTorrent
5) Restoration File Undelete Utility
6) UltraVNC Remote Administration