Whenever a program is written to be " portable " or portable, it means that it does not require installation and that it can be started immediately after downloading it. This quality becomes very important because it allows these programs to be started even from a USB stick, on any computer.
After using these programs, detaching the USB stick, there is no longer a trace of their presence and of the use made.
The advantage therefore becomes to bring your favorite programs on the pen drive and to use them on any PC, even from an internet cafe, from shared computers at school and university and from the workplace.
As seen, there are portable versions of almost all the most popular programs collected in a list of the best portable programs .
On this occasion, however, we see how to transform a program installed on your computer into a portable or "portable" version so that you can then copy it onto any removable medium and you can use it anywhere, without ever installing it.
A program is portable when it works independently from the computer in use, this means that it does not touch the registry keys and does not write on it .
Without going to the technician, the software that can be transformed into portable programs are only those that work independently of the system where they are used.
Software such as antivirus, firewalls, Office and more complex programs cannot be turned into laptops.
Other programs such as Firefox, Messenger or Skype have been transformed into portable software by professional developers, without using automatic tools.
What remains for us in this article therefore refers only to those simpler programs that do not interact with system resources.
The price to pay for using a portable program is that it goes slower because it uses more computer memory.
In cases where the program folder in C: / Programs does not contain subfolders, a simple compressor called UPX can be used.
Once UPX is downloaded you get a .rar file to extract to a folder.
Inside there are two files, UPX.exe and compress.bat .
Now you have to look for the program to be transformed by going to C: / Programs and checking that it has no subfolders.
If the requirement is met, the two files, UPX.exe and compress.bat, must be copied into the program folder and then pressed on compress.bat.
At that point the program became portable and it is possible to copy that folder to different paths or to a USB stick.
Alternatively, for programs whose folder is larger and contains subfolders, you can use the famous WinRar archive extractor and another software called UniExtractor .
With Uniextractor you take the setup file of the program to be transformed into a portable one and extract it (the item appears on the right-click menu).
Next, take the folder just extracted and recompress it with WinRar which has, among its functions, that of compressing a folder by creating an .exe file.
During the compression procedure you have to call the package with the name ending in .exe and not in .rar, you have to check the box " self-extracting archive " (or SFX archive ) and you have to choose the best compression method in the relative drop down menu.
In the " Advanced " tab you must press the " Self-Extracting Module " button.
From here you go into the Mode tab and select " Hide all " and then " Overwrite all files " while in the "General tab you must write by hand, under the heading" Run after extraction "the .exe file that launch the program (for example firefox.exe or opera.exe).
In fact there are other software that create portable applications, many of them are not free but one in particular deserves a mention.
It is called VMWare ThinApp and is a virtualization software whose use requires the study of the guide.
I have not tried it but I am sure that better results can be obtained.
Another article has written an easy way to create portable programs from installations on the computer.
