Portable apps

[Pawnless Endgame]

I posted this thread a few years ago, thought I'd post it again to see what the attitude towards these apps is like nowadays. I've embraced them since 2004. I tried installing a program, copying its directory to another partition, uninstall it from the source drive and see if it still ran in the copied location. If it did, then it's proven portable, no missing DLLs etc. Then there's this site http://portableapps.com/apps

The idea is that you can reformat or do a new PC build or copy to a secondary computer and they're all already set up with the config files / preferences from where you've left it. It's like going back to retro computing where you had 10+ games on a floppy and they just ran there and then on an out-of-the-box computer.

I use:

7-Zip (file compression)
Bonkenc (CD ripper to MP3)
Firefox (browser)
Foxit (PDF viewer)
GIMP (art program)
InfraRecorder (CD burner)
Jpegr (lossless JPEG rotation)
Media Player Classic (for haters of Quicktime, Real Player and Windows Media Player!)
Pidgin (cross-network chat client)
Thunderbird (email client)
VLC (another video player)
Winamp (music player)

So when I reformat, the above are all already installed. The only thing I have to install is MS Office + drivers + service pack.