How do you organize your portable software?

[E-66]

Programs with installers typically install to the Program Files folder, but there's a lot of portable/self-contained software out there now.  If you download such a program, it goes to wherever you have your browser set to download stuff..... which is presumably NOT to your Program Files folder.  While it probably doesn't matter where you download it to for initially inspecting/testing the program to see if you want to keep it, from an organizational point of view it probably doesn't make sense to leave it there forever.

So what do you do with portable programs you decide to keep?  Do you move them to your Program Files folder (or perhaps create a 'Portable Apps' folder within the Program Files folder and keep them all together) and manually make shortcuts to them?  If not, what do you do?

[Tripredacus]

16 hours ago, E-66 said:

If you download such a program, it goes to wherever you have your browser set to download stuff

Never! I set all my browsers to prompt. Besides, the default location is in the user profile. That should be kept as small as possible.

I just have a folder on one of my drives with all my portables in it. I generally only use them from a USB key, and that key has everything in the root.

[Monroe]

I just have a folder named Unzipped and that works for me ... it has many items inside.

[j7n]

I don't make a distinction between portable or unportable software. A product may change the directory where it writes its settings file in an update, while continuing to work the same in other aspects. Most applications remain functional if they can't find their settings on a fresh OS.

All software I have gets installed or manually copied into a directory called c:\bin or d:\apps; only system components that don't offer the choice go into Program Files. I avoid Microsoft-managed shell folders, and have done so long before NT6 and the complications it added. My archive of software is organized by category, such as "communications" or "text editors". I copy a compressed archive or installer in there after I've tested it, and don't run anything from this location.

I don't use any 3rd party portability wrappers.