What are portable applications?

By , 11 November 2015 at 16:30
What are portable applications?
Digital

What are portable applications?

By , 11 November 2015 at 16:30

We explain below what portable applications are, how they differ from the normal versions of a program, what their advantages and disadvantages are and where you can download them from.
The flash drive is one of the best and most practical technological inventions in existence. It is a device small enough to carry in your pocket but with increasingly large storage capacity, enabling you to take all the files you need around with you.

Installing a lot of programs on your computer can “pollute” the system.

A flash drive is particularly suitable for storing portable applications, which are very useful when you go away or at times when you have to use other computers you don’t want to install anything on. But what is a portable application? And how does it differ from the normal version?

Portable applications

Most of the time, when you want to use an application you have to install it. This process takes several minutes and creates a directory on the computer’s hard drive which contains all the information related to the program which is needed to use it. Portable applications don’t need to be installed, you can just run them and start using them immediately. All you have to do is download the file and save it somewhere.

Portable applications usually come in compressed files, which contain everything you need for them to work. Once all the files are extracted (which can be done from a portable device), they are ready to use. These files are the equivalent of the directories which are created on your computer when you install programs, with the difference that once you stop using the applications you can close them without leaving any traces of them on that particular computer.

Advantages of portable applications

They can easily be moved from computer to computer. You only need to copy the folder with all the application files onto a flash drive, which will be sufficient to use them on any PC.

When you buy a new computer you can copy all the portable applications onto it rather than install them. This will save a lot of time downloading, installing and configuring everything you use.

Although Windows has improved a great deal in this respect, if you don’t do any maintenance it will become slower and slower. This is due to many reasons, one of which is installing a lot of programs which “pollute” the system in several ways. Portable applications prevent the above.

If you don’t have much storage space left on your hard disk, it’s a good idea to use portable applications on a removable device.

If you have to work on a computer which is not yours and you need certain programs, having  portable versions of them is a great solution because you won’t have to spend hours installing them and you will leave the PC clean, as if nobody has used it.

If you acquire a protected computer for which you don’t need administrator permissions to install applications, portable applications work perfectly.

The flash drive is one of the best and most practical technological inventions in existence.

Disadvantages of portable applications

Not all programs are available in portable versions.

Portable applications do not always have all the features of the normal versions.

Some portable programs leave traces in the temporary folder. This is not necessarily a problem but, if a user is concerned about his or her privacy, this should be kept in mind.

Where can I get portable applications?

Many developers have portable versions of their applications. When you are going to download an application it is important to look for alternative downloads to get the portable version. You can also download complete packages of portable applications, such as those provided by PortableApps, Lupo PenSuite and PendriveApps. Another option is to look through the list of Portable Freeware, where there are 500 portable applications ready to be downloaded, or this other list in Hypertextual with popular software.

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