Portable Applications in Windows XP: Which Ones to Use

I was assembling a list of preferred Windows XP applications.  Part of my goal was to replace installed apps with portable apps where possible.  Doing so had the advantages of getting back up and running much more quickly, whenever I would have to reinstall Windows; reducing system problems due to misbehaving applications; and having my favorite tools available, in my preferred configuration, when I had to use someone else's computer.  With the emergence of cloud computing, among other things, there had been a trend toward the virtualization of applications -- toward, that is, making apps less dependent upon a single piece of hardware.
So now I was engaged in a search for applications that would replace some of those I had traditionally installed on my Windows XP systems.  In my search, I found there were many sources of portable apps, including the categorized and somewhat ranked set in Andrew Lee's Portable Freeware Collection.  I used these sources to supplement and revise the set that I had started with, from PortableApps.com.  It seemed likely that I would continue to add preferred portable apps from various sources indefinitely.  In that sense, this post can only be a step along the way.  Even so, by this time I had accumulated enough applications to say a few things on the subject.

Microsoft Office and Alternatives 

Perhaps the single most important thing to say was that there were substitutes for Microsoft Office.  This was important because it permitted some freedom from dependence upon Microsoft programs.  I had already achieved some such freedom by switching to Ubuntu as my operating system and by running Windows XP within VMware virtual machines (VMs) on Ubuntu/WinXP dual-boot machines.  Through that step, I had multiple alternatives, whenever Microsoft Windows and/or Office failed me:  I could run Microsoft Office, or the freeware OpenOffice alternative, on either Windows or Ubuntu, either natively or virtually.  After that, there were very few times when I was substantially unable to get work done because of some software failure arising from Microsoft software.

The next step in that regard was to move away from treating either Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office as my primary operating or office system.  Where Windows was concerned, I had recently concluded that the computing world, and I, had not yet come up with a superior end-user alternative for PC-based (as distinct from e.g., Apple) systems.  There were far more, and far more useful, software applications available on Windows than on Ubuntu or other varieties of Linux.  But in the case of Office, it did increasingly appear that there were superior alternatives -- notably OpenOffice.  Then, too, I was among those keyboard-oriented users who were put off by the mouse-oriented ribbon that debuted in Office 2007.  In any event, I had had too many experiences with malfunctioning computer installations that desperately needed to be reinstalled, but that I was currently unable to reinstall because it would take too many hours to install and adjust Office and other heavyweight programs.

The current search for portable apps pushed me further in the direction of seeking an alternative to Microsoft Office.  As described in a separate post, people were struggling with the non-portability of Office 2003 and 2007.  Some pursued the option of downloading a presumably bootleg copy of Microsoft Office that was somehow converted into portable format.  That option (as noted in that other post) entailed considerable risk of viral infection, instability, and inflexibility.  Another option, which I did pursue, was to create my own portable version from my own copy of Office.  That, too, did not turn out well, primarily because the software capable of doing it properly was still too expensive.  Since I considered portability a real benefit, I was thus even more motivated to take seriously the OpenOffice alternative, which was freely available in Windows-based portable form.

Other Top Portable Apps 

Of course, there is more to the world than office productivity software.  A complete set of portable apps must depend on the needs of the individual user.  But it may be possible to select some, from among the estimated 150 categories displayed in the Portable Freeware Collection, from which a typical user might want to draw at least one portable app.

In preparing this list, I excluded many categories that did not interest me and/or in which I was not knowledgeable.  Among these excluded categories (to name a few) were those having to do with iPods, mp3 tags, games, and IM.  Also, in some instances, I took more than one example from a category (especially from categories with grab-bag names like "miscellaneous"), or took something other than the top-ranked program.  I have also used my own category headings, rather those supplied by the PFC website.  In short, this list is offered for purposes of interest, not precision.

Audio and Video

XMedia Recode
Audacity
IrfanView
Duplicate Music Files Finder
VirtualDub Portable
VLC
XBlender

Images, Graphics, Scanning

Photoscape
Dia
Softi FreeOCR

CD/DVD

ImgBurn
Virtual CDRom Control Panel
WinToFlash
Folder2Iso
BonkEnc

Files and Folders

Multi File Tool
7-Zip
TreeSize
Duplicate File Finder
ICE ECC
FreeCommander
FileCommander 
Undelete Plus
Bulk Rename Utility
Index Your Files
Unlocker

Backup and Synchronization

Toucan
FastCopy
ozSync

Downloading, FTP

Free Download Manager
FileZilla
WinHTTrack
uTorrent
VDownloader

Security & Privacy

PortableTor
Blowfish Advanced CS
ClamWin Portable
KeePass
CCleaner
Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder

Web Browsers

Firefox
Opera
FireTune
Opera Settings Import & Export Tool

PDF

Scan2PDF
Foxit Reader
Swift PDF

Registry Editing

Registry Commander
Regshot
RegFromApp
RegScanner

Remote Collaboration

ShowMyPC
TeamViewer

Bookmarks

TrayURL
AM-DeadLink

Fun & Entertainment

Raindrop
Sumotori Dreams
Wallpaper Randomizer

System Information

SIW 
PC Wizard 
Autoruns

Calendar & Time

Sunbird
TimeSync

General Reference

Convert
WeatherMate

HTML & Text Editing

KompoZer
HTML Portable Editor
Notepad++

Onscreen

ClipX
PNotes
SysExporter
Virtual Magnifying Glass

Phone & Email

Thunderbird
Skype

Math & Statistics

SpeedCrunch
R

Productivity & Desktop Layout

OpenOffice
WinTabber
VirtuaWin

Other

RamBooster
Stalled Printer Repair
EjectUSB
JkDefrag
AutoIt
Don't Sleep
PStart
Scribus
DSpeech

Portable Apps: OpenOffice as an Alternative to Microsoft Office

I was in the process of assembling a set of portable applications to run in Windows XP.  After some investigation and experimentation, I concluded that there was not presently a solid, affordable way of making a portable version of my copy of Microsoft Office 2003.  Since I did want office-type programs in my set of portable apps, I decided to look into alternatives to Office.

One alternative, of course, was to upgrade to a more recent version of Microsoft Office.  In the case of Office 2010, there were (as with Office 2003) various offers of free downloads of a portable version.  Some of these offers seemed to be related to an offer of a free trial that Microsoft had floated in 2009.  Others were apparently pirated versions, typically with little explanation of how the portability had been achieved.  I did not investigate the question of how well these copies would work.

Since acquiring Softricity, Microsoft itself had moved toward developing application virtualization for purposes of facilitating enterprise software installation.  Of course, that was a long way from setting up Office to run from a USB stick.  At this writing, Microsoft's concept of portability was oriented toward portable devices (e.g., phones, laptops).  Office 2010 did come with "portable device rights" in this sense.  There did seem to be one way to install Office 2010 on a USB drive with Microsoft's blessing, more or less:  obtain and install Office 2010 Starter Edition, and then install Starter Edition on a USB drive.  Starter Edition was adware; it replaced Microsoft Works; it consisted solely of limited versions of Word 2010 and Excel 2010; and it was officially available only a preloaded software on purchased computers.  There were ways to download it otherwise.

I had several reasons for not choosing the Microsoft option.  Those reasons included a need for some advanced features, a need for the ability to work with other kinds of files, especially via PowerPoint and Access, a desire to avoid the distraction of adware, and a preference for not being dependent upon Microsoft.  This was not to say that I would avoid using Office 2010 altogether.  I just wanted something that would work effectively on a USB drive.

Another alternative to Office 2010 was to move away from Microsoft altogether, to the extent possible.  There were several apparently significant alternatives to choose from.  The most popular still seemed to be OpenOffice.  The OpenOffice suite continued to have the advantage of being usable on multiple platforms -- so that, for instance, I could still get into a file, via Ubuntu Live CD (or dual boot, or virtual underlayer), even when Microsoft Windows or Office became completely nonfunctional.  OpenOffice also included programs that would work with those varieties of files just mentioned (i.e., Access databases, PowerPoint presentations).

One question, for me, was whether OpenOffice would display the relatively unrefined kind of interface and functionality that had recently prompted me, despite myself, to lean back toward using Windows rather than Ubuntu applications (even if I was doing so primarily in Windows running within a VMware virtual machine on Ubuntu).  If I had ever used OpenOffice in Windows, it had been a long time ago; in recent years I had only used it in Ubuntu, and very infrequently at that.  So now I took another look.  I did a brief trial run of OpenOffice Writer Portable for Windows, running from a hard drive, just to sample its look and feel.  Preliminarily, it looked and felt good -- noticeably better and more familiar than the Ubuntu version, though no doubt the two actually functioned pretty much the same.  On this basis, I decided to go ahead with some efforts toward using OOo (as they call it, short for OpenOffice.org) Writer more frequently.

Portability, another question, was a no-brainer.  The version that I had just sampled was part of the PortableApps.com standard suite.  The concept was that I would set up my full portable suite on the hard drive, so as to avoid having to install programs whenever I set up a new computer or virtual machine, and then I would copy that folder of portable apps to the USB flash drive when I needed to take those tools on the road -- with my laptop or to someone else's computer.  With this concept in mind, I returned to my effort to come up with a good set of portable applications for Windows XP.

Portabilizing Apps with Ceedo Personal

I was trying to create a portable version of Microsoft Office 2003.  That effort had led me to discover a positive review of Ceedo Personal and a favorable contrast against PortableApps.com by PC Magazine.  I decided to take advantage of a free trial to explore Ceedo.  This post described that exploration.

I was running this test on Windows XP SP3, running in a cloned virtual machine (VM) in VMware Workstation 7.1.  This VM was running a bit slow, but a VM generally would give me the option of wiping out everything and just making another clone, where I could start the experiment over from the beginning.

In the case of Ceedo, the VM did not seem to matter.  When I tried to install Ceedo in that VM, it insisted, instead, on being installed to a removable device.  That seemed unfortunate.  I had been working on developing a folder full of portable apps that I could use on my own computers and could also copy to a USB drive.  Running them from the hard drive was much faster than running them from the USB drive, so that's what I planned to do when working at home.  It now seemed that Ceedo was not going to cooperate with that plan.  But I hoped that a solution to this problem would emerge as we went along, so I went ahead with the installation on the USB drive.

During the installation process, I got a balloon pop-up telling me that the Ceedo Tray Icon Indicator would light up whenever I was using a program that was running under the Ceedo environment.  I guessed that this was a replacement for the previous approach that I had read about, where Ceedo would surround its own programs with an orange line.  Then Ceedo installed a toolbar at the top of the screen.  When installation was done, I had the option of taking a tour, which I did.  The gist of it was that Ceedo gave me that toolbar, which I hated, with its four buttons -- three of which were completely unnecessary, since they merely opened My Documents, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express.  The fourth button opened something that looked like the Windows Start Menu, with Ceedo-specific choices (in addition to yet another set of My Documents, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express).  There was no entry for Ceedo in the real Windows XP Start Menu, which made sense from a no-impact perspective; apparently the top toolbar was running entirely from the USB drive.  I used the top toolbar to open My Documents and no, the orange line had not been removed; it was there after all.  Since the only thing I needed from the top toolbar was the imitation start menu, and since I could get that by clicking on the Ceedo icon in the system tray (bottom right corner of the screen), I went into Ceedo's Options and instructed it to hide the toolbar when it was not in use.  I also changed some other settings.

I felt that Ceedo needed to give that imitation start menu a name.  For present purposes, I will call it the "Ceedo menu."  I went into that menu > Add Programs > Programs Directory.  It seemed to wish to open its own session of Internet Explorer, and apparently could not tolerate the fact that I already had Internet Explorer running.  It said, "iexplore.exe is already running.  Click 'OK' to open Ceedo's Internet Explorer and close the local Internet Explorer."  So I said OK.  Ceedo could perhaps instead give users the option of searching automatically for installed programs (or at least those having Start Menu entries) in the background; then, when users actually sought to open a file, they might have the option of doing so in those installed programs rather than mandatorily running them from the USB drive.  This would have avoided both the need to shut down the running program (Internet Explorer) and the slowness that I was experiencing when Ceedo did everything from the USB drive.  My present understanding was that speeding up Ceedo (if I could not run it from the desktop instead of the USB drive) would require buying a faster USB drive, such as the Kingston Vault (presently $40+).  In any case, the Ceedo menu did not stay onscreen during this process; it vanished as soon as I chose Programs Directory.  Programs Directory, itself, turned out to be just the Ceedo webpage listing the various freeware apps that you could apparently run from Ceedo.

I was more interested in seeing if Ceedo could portabilize my apps.  I experimented, first, with IrfanView.  To portabilize Irfanview, I went to the Ceedo menu > Add Programs > Argo Application Installer.  It offered to show me a list of programs supported by Argo, so I clicked on that option.  Nothing happened.  After playing around a bit, I found that it was trying to take me to a different list of applications than the one that I had just seen.  There weren't many items on it, and it didn't seem to contain any deep, dark secrets.  So apparently Ceedo was still in the process of trying to organize its website.

So anyway, back in Argo, I tried to point toward the IrfanView .exe file.  It was very slow in identifying the .exe files in My Computer.  It occurred to me that I wasn't sure whether it wanted the setup .exe or the installed, ready-to-run .exe.  I tried the IrfanView setup .exe.  That, in itself, was a bit perplexing, because there were two IrfanView setup .exe files -- the setup itself, and the plugins -- and I would want them both included in my IrfanView installation.  There wasn't an option, as there had seemed to be in JauntePE, to include materials that had been incorporated into a previous iteration of the portable app.  But anyway, on the next screen, Argo confirmed that I had guessed right:  it said, "The wizard will now launch the following setup file."  It gave me an option of installing in "reduced machine separation mode," which a webpage said would entail some permanent installation on the host PC in order to use that machine's resources.  Another page said, somewhat obscurely, that this "reduced separation mode" would enable the portable app to "interact" with apps on the host.  The idea seemed to be that you should choose this option only if you or the program actually needed that kind of interaction.

So I went ahead with the Argo process.  It gave me the IrfanView installation screen.  I went through the IrfanView installation process.  When that was finished, Argo was gone, and I had an IrfanView installation in the designated folder on the hard drive.  I realized then that maybe I should have designated a folder on the USB drive.  I couldn't tell if Argo had done anything in particular to make IrfanView portable, since IrfanView tends to be portable anyway.  I also couldn't tell what I should do to install the IrfanView plugins, other than (I guess) just run them through the Argo process and point to the same output directory.

So, OK, maybe IrfanView wasn't the best program to experiment with.  I tried again, this time with Microsoft Word 2003.  I started Argo, browsed to the Office 2003 installation executable file, and ran it.  After a while, I got this:

Microsoft Office 2003 Setup
Error 1719.  The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed.  This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed.

That was odd.  I had just installed and uninstalled Office 2003 in that same VM.  The installer had worked fine then.  But OK, I created another clone VM, in which there had been no prior Office 2003 installation, and booted it up.  This time around, I did something that perhaps I should have done last time:  I rebooted when I got the message that the hardware (i.e., the USB drive) had been recognized but might not work properly until I rebooted.  After I rebooted, I got a Ceedo Action Window that gave me the option of enabling Ceedo AutoDetect.  That, according to the Ceedo help file, was a "tiny" optional component, installed on the host, to detect whenever a Ceedo drive was connected.  I said yes, do this.  It took Ceedo a long time to load; and when the "Loading Ceedo" message did finally disappear, I was surprised to see that the Ceedo icon likewise disappeared from the system tray.  I went to the USB drive in Windows Explorer and restarted Ceedo manually from there, but it said, "Ceedo already running."  Yet it did start a new "Loading Ceedo" message anyway.  If Ceedo was running, where was it?

Eventually, I did get a Ceedo icon in the system tray, and when I clicked on it, I was able to go back into Argo and start the Office 2003 installation again.  I tried again to install Office 2003 and again got that Error 1719 error message.  This was occurring in a VM clone like those that I had been using repeatedly in recent days to test various programs.  To test it, I closed Ceedo, removed the USB drive from the system, and tried installing Office 2003 natively in that VM.  It ran without difficulty.

That concluded my test of Ceedo.  Moreover, since my investigation had not turned up any superior alternatives to Ceedo that would do the job, this concluded my search for tools that would give me an affordable, portable copy of Microsoft Office 2003.  So at this point I returned to the main project -- of developing a set of portable applications for Windows XP -- with the sense that I might need to consider alternatives to Office 2003.

Microsoft Office 2003 Updates in 2010 and Beyond

Introduction

At one point, I had installed Microsoft Office Professional 2003, and I wanted to know what updates were available.  Once upon a time, that was easy to determine.  You would just go to the Microsoft Office Updates webpage and let it take a look at your computer and tell you what you needed.  But that webpage was no longer available.

Microsoft was apparently still supporting Office 2003, and it was still possible to get updates from the general-purpose Microsoft Updates webpage.  But under various conditions, that would not work either.  For instance, Microsoft might decide to cut off that source of automated updates for Office 2003, just as it had cut off its Office Updates automatic detector.  Or you might not be able to go online when you were doing your installation.  Or if you did go online, as I had sometimes experienced, that webpage might not be willing or able to detect the condition of your computer and figure out which updates you needed.  Or you might be trying to install all available updates at once -- that is, you might not be willing to wait around until the webpage did detect all of the updates you might need.  That was the situation at present.  I was trying to convert Office 2003 into a set of portable applications, and for that purpose I needed to do all of my updates at once if they were to be included in the portable executable package.

To figure out what updates I needed, I went to the general-purpose Microsoft Office Downloads webpage and glanced at its hundreds of downloads, including many that were unnecessary and even obsolete.  Then, taking a different approach, I looked at another computer, where Office 2003 had been installed in March 2009.  (On that machine, all Office programs were installed except InfoPath, and Outlook 2007 had been installed in lieu of Outlook 2003.)  On that machine, I went into Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Show Updates.  Under Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, it listed a number of updates.  Those updates had been installed automatically by Office Update between March 12, 2009 and March 10, 2010.  With one exception, all of the updates listed there were newer than Office Pro Service Pack 3 (SP3).  That one exception had not been included in SP3, so apparently Office Update knew that it still had to install it separately.

Armed with that information, I went back to the full list of Office updates.  At this writing, there were 3,204 items on that list.  I sorted them by Release Date and skipped ahead to the page for September 2007, when SP3 was released.  I noticed that there were other SP3 packages released at about that same time, for a variety of Microsoft products, including some that were related to Office 2003 tools or capabilities (e.g., Office 2003 Proofing Tools) that I had not installed and/or had not been using on that other computer, and that therefore had not been updated.  So the list that I was developing in this post would probably not be sufficient for all purposes and all users of Office 2003.

I decided to assume that the automatic Office updating feature had been giving me what I needed, for my Office 2003 installation, up through that last update on March 10, 2010.  Therefore, I skipped ahead again, in the Microsoft webpage list, to the page showing updates released on or after that date.  That page was very near the end of the list.  (I tried, here in this post, to provide links to these points in the list, so that other users would not have to page through the list manually, but I found that Microsoft had structured the pages so that the links invariably led to the start of the list.  Microsoft did not itself bother to provide a button leading to the end of the list.)  From that point forward in the list, starting in March 2010, there were not any other updates pertaining to Office 2003.  So it seemed that the March 2010 updates were the state of the art.

But that could hardly be correct.  After thinking a moment, I remembered that, because of a broken installer or some other problem that I had been unable to fix, that other computer had ceased to install updates from the regular Microsoft Update webpage.  So now I asked that webpage to examine that computer and indicate what other updates it needed.  It came back with a list that included several more updates specifically related to Office 2003.  I did not know why these additional updates had not appeared in that list of 3,204 updates on the Microsoft Office webpage.

The List of Updates Generally

I combined that list of uninstalled updates, from the Microsoft Update webpage, with the list of updates that had been installed successfully.  Here is that combined list, with links to the relevant KnowledgeBase pages:

Release Date	Programs Affected	KB Number
11/08/05	Excel, Word	KB907417
09/17/07	All Office 2003 (SP3)	KB923618
12/08/07	Outlook	KB943649
02/11/08	All Office 2003	KB945185
02/12/08	Works File Converter	KB943973
05/12/08	Publisher	KB950213
08/08/08	Access Snapshot Viewer	KB955439
08/08/08	All Office 2003	KB921598
09/08/08	All Office 2003	KB953404
11/07/08	All Office 2003	KB951535
10/09/09	Outlook	KB974554
10/09/09	Outlook	KB973705
10/13/09	All Office 2003	KB972580
10/22/09	Web Components	KB947319
11/09/09	All Office 2003	KB973443
12/07/09	All Office 2003	KB975051
12/17/09	All Office 2003	KB978551
02/04/10	PowerPoint	KB976881
03/05/10	Outlook	KB979771
03/05/10	Excel	KB978474
05/10/10	All Office 2003	KB976382
06/04/10	PowerPoint	KB982157
06/04/10	Publisher	KB982122
06/04/10	All Office 2003	KB982311
06/04/10	InfoPath	KB980923
07/07/10	Access	KB981716
07/08/10	Outlook	KB980373
08/05/10	Word	KB2251399
08/04/10	Outlook	KB2279246
08/04/10	Excel	KB2264403

Again, this list would vary if one were to install other components from Office 2003.  My purpose here is primarily just to sketch out what seems to be one way of determining what updates are needed for one Office 2003 configuration.

The List of Updates for Word 2003 Specifically 

This list of updates, and the other information provided above, seemed to provide a straightforward guide to the updates that would be needed for individual components within Office 2003.  I tested that assumption, starting with Word 2003.  That is, I installed only Word 2003, without any other Office 2003 components beyond those that were automatically installed for any Office configuration.

I expected, from the foregoing information, that the Microsoft Update webpage would detect and install all of the items from the foregoing list that pertained either to Word specifically or to Office generally,  I expected, in other words, that when the dust settled and all the updates were installed, Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs would show me just the following updates under Microsoft Office 2003:

Release Date	Programs Affected	KB Number
11/08/05	Excel, Word	KB907417
09/17/07	All Office 2003 (SP3)	KB923618
02/11/08	All Office 2003	KB945185
08/08/08	All Office 2003	KB921598
09/08/08	All Office 2003	KB953404
11/07/08	All Office 2003	KB951535
10/13/09	All Office 2003	KB972580
10/22/09	Web Components	KB947319
11/09/09	All Office 2003	KB973443
12/07/09	All Office 2003	KB975051
12/17/09	All Office 2003	KB978551
05/10/10	All Office 2003	KB976382
06/04/10	All Office 2003	KB982311
08/05/10	Word	KB2251399

That, however, is not quite how it had worked out.  After installing only Word 2003, the Microsoft Windows Update webpage was telling me that I had no other updates to install.  I thought maybe this was because it was a brand-new installation and it needed some stimulation to get busy and figure out where it stood.  In hopes of triggering some action, I started Word and fiddled with it for a minute, and then I rebooted the system.  But the Update webpage still showed no other updates available.  Likewise when I powered down the system and left it alone for a couple of days.

I wasn't sure what that meant.  Was the Windows Update webpage never going to detect that updates were needed?  Or did I just have to use Word for a while, triggering some unknown functions, before it would become aware of its desperate need for an update?  Did it matter that I was doing this inside a VMware virtual machine (VM), rather than in a native WinXP installation?

The alternative to the automated online update, of course, was to just go ahead and install that list of Word-specific updates manually.  So I did that.  I uninstalled and reinstalled Word; and when it ended, I accepted its offer to go online and check for updates.  Without the old Office Update webpage, however, that option just delivered me to the general-purpose webpage mentioned above.  I killed that and started down the list of updates, installing them one by one, beginning with SP3 (KB923618).

After doing that, I went into Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Show Updates and verified that those updates were all listed under Microsoft Office 2003.  They weren't.  KB945185 wasn't listed.  I ran it again, and it said, "This update has already been applied or is included in an update that has already been applied."  That puzzled me:  how would I have gotten its number in the first place, if it hadn't been listed previously?  Same thing with KB953404.  Anyway, then I went to the Windows Update website to double-check that there were no others.  There weren't.

Conclusion

I could have continued with the same approach for Excel 2003 and other components of Office 2003.  In the meantime, however, it had developed that the underlying goal of creating a portable version of Office 2003 was not feasible with existing programs and resources.  So I did not continue on to explore what updates would be needed for those other Office components.