Portable or Installer
While downloading various programs, you probably noticed that developers often offer several versions of installers. And some of their names contain the word Portable. What does this mean?
These are the so-called portable programs or they are also called portable, stand-alone. They do not require an installation process on your computer. You simply copy a file or folder with program files to your computer and run it without installation, that is, without installation.
What is the advantage of such programs?
Firstly, many of them can be run under a limited account, that is, without administrator rights. When installing a regular version of a program, as a rule, administrative rights are required, since during installation the program places data about itself and its files in the system registry of the operating system. The portable version does not change system files, which means that administrator rights are not needed to run it.
Secondly, all the “garbage” generated during installation and operation of the program does not clog the registry, dynamic libraries, system folders and will not further slow down the operation of your operating system.
But the most important advantage is that you can write a portable program onto a flash drive and run it on any computer directly from it. For example, you can put on a flash drive a portable version of the Mozilla Thunderbird email client or any other that you are used to. Then you won't have to carry your laptop with you when traveling. In any Internet cafe you will receive mail from all your mailboxes with just a few clicks of the mouse button.
On the Internet you can find many portable versions of programs that were created by ordinary users for themselves. Many people, when creating portable programs, later decide to share them with other people, but here you need to be very careful since not everyone does this with good intentions - such creativity may contain Trojan viruses, spyware and other malicious software.
You should not download Portable from file hosting sites or torrent trackers. It is best to take portable versions of programs from the official websites of the developers, although it must be admitted that not all programs have an official portable version.
True, there are special packages that allow you to create Portable for other programs, but they are quite complicated to set up and use and, unfortunately, do not always work correctly. So, unfortunately, it is not always possible and not for all programs to create a working, fully functional portable version.
