What are programs called that you don't h install but just use the .exe or whatever the filetype may be? Also are there any advantage to these?

standalone programs are the programs u usually just have a few files (one usually, imo). the only advantage i can think of is that there is not an installer routine for them and they can be placed in any directory

Edited January 14, 200620 yr by lordflyingpoo

also 'portable apps'.

the advantages of stand-alone applications is that they are generally much cleaner - many do not write to the registry and do not dump files all over the drive. un-installation often means just deleting the directory in which the program resides - done. and, as mentioned previously, they're often portable, so you can easily run them from a flash drive for instance.

AnalogX - is a great resource for stand-alone software! although some stuff is packaged with an installer, none of his stuff installs files outside of the program directory.

Sysinternals - a lot of useful, stand-alone apps.

Stand Alone is another good resource.

Edited January 14, 200620 yr by atomizer

Check out my website if you want to leard about portable applications. THere are greats:

http://standalone.atspace.org/index.html

I'm looking for a decent dvd ripper/burning 'standalone' app. I've search but haven't found one that did both. It'd be nice if it were like DVD Decrypter or DVD Shrink.

whats wrong with the two you mentioned?

whats wrong with the two you mentioned?

Nothing at all. I'm just trying to find an alternate standalone for my laptop. Just an experiment really. I have two laptops and I'm going for mostly standalone apps on one and then on the other I'm looking for all freeware programs that are better or fairly close to the ones I normally use. Trying to help out some college buddies that have no money XD!

i wonder if you could just pull the executable you need from one of the packages mentioned previously?

Edited January 15, 200620 yr by atomizer

i wonder if you could just pull the executable you need from one of the packages mentioned previously?

Well that'd be nice if I could. When those are installed and I look into their installation directories there are only two files; one being the .exe and the other a read-me.txt. I'll try copying the executables and accessing them on my other system. Is that all you're meaning for me to do?

yes that works. In fact that also works with DVDFab Decrypter and ShrinkTo5.

ive noticed with most small programs the have an installer just to assist in creating shortcuts and adding themselves to add/remove programs.

Edited January 15, 200620 yr by DigeratiPrime

Confirmed! Thanks for this info.

i wonder if you could just pull the executable you need from one of the packages mentioned previously?

Well that'd be nice if I could. When those are installed and I look into their installation directories there are only two files; one being the .exe and the other a read-me.txt. I'll try copying the executables and accessing them on my other system. Is that all you're meaning for me to do?

yeah, that's sort of what i meant. i don't know about the packages previously mentioned (DVD decrypter and the other one), but some encoding packages are mainly just a conglomerate of a multitude of 3rd party applications. i thought that maybe a particular package might use a particular executable for just CD/DVD burning. if that were the case, then you could just use that .exe if you couldn't find it elsewhere.

yes that works. In fact that also works with DVDFab Decrypter and ShrinkTo5.

ive noticed with most small programs the have an installer just to assist in creating shortcuts and adding themselves to add/remove programs.

I did confirm this to work with Decrypter and Shrink. I've even made a copy of the entire Limewire directory then uninstalled the program and that works too. I don't know if all those files are needed or not but it works for me for now. I'll toy with that more when I get home. Though if any of you know anything about this please let me know. Will this work for some other programs like the bigger ones; photoshop, nero...any games perhaps?

I have two chat clients, drcrypter and shrink, a torrent client, limewire, openoffice, dvd43 and a cd burning program that just run as executables...no-install~AWESOME!

I'm just looking for more and/or ways to 'convert' the programs I do use. I think it'd be cool to show the system I'm experiementing with this on to my friends and have only updates, drivers and a few things installed yet be as fully functional as all of my other computers.

use sandboxie to fool programs into installing, then just copy the needed binaries. you can also use the 'universal extractor' to unpack installers and grab just the needed binaries. it works most of the time.