A Multiboot USB Drive with Windows 7, Ubuntu, UBCD4Win, Drive Tools, etc. - Second Cut

I had previously worked through the steps to create a bootable USB drive.  I had intended to create just a simple alternative to booting the basicWindows 7 system recovery tools from a CD, but it turned out to be easier to make a more powerful and flexible multiboot USB drive.  Now I had a larger (16GB) USB drive, and more stuff to put on it.  This post contains what I hoped would be a simpler and more comprehensive description of the process of setting up that kind of multiboot device.

USB Drive Setup

I started with YUMI and a bunch of ISOs, either downloaded or created with ImgBurn (see the previous post).  For now, the ISOs I wanted to install were the full Windows 7 DVD, the Windows 7 System Recovery CD, the full Windows XP SP3 CD, Ubuntu 10.10 and 12.04, Knoppix, Acronis True Image Home (ATIH) 11 and also ATIH 2011 with Universal Restore, Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) and UBCD4Win, Balder FreeDOS, Hiren's Boot CD, BartPE, U.S. DOD LPS, Super Grub Disk, Super Grub2 Disk, MHDD, Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic, Memtest86+, Balder FreeDOS, Darik's Boot & Nuke (DBAN), Clonezilla, GParted, Partition Wizard, Parted Magic and diagnostic CDs for Samsung, Hitachi, Western Digital, and Seagate hard drives.  Some of these, I knew, were redundant.  I figured I would work out the details later; I was just curious to see how much would fit, and what would work, in the multiboot approach.

Some of those ISOs were already listed as distributions in YUMI.  That was true for Balder FreeDOS, Clonezilla, DBAN, GParted, Hiren's Boot CD, Knoppix, Memtest86+, Parted Magic, Partition Wizard, both flavors of Ubuntu, UBCD, and the Windows 7 installer.  For the others, there was an option at the bottom of the YUMI menu:  Try an Unlisted ISO.  Except for that last choice, using the option to install a recognized ISO would remove that ISO from the list, apparently to help people keep track of what had already been installed.

The ISOs that I had created from CDs, using ImgBurn, were not necessarily named properly. YUMI didn't recognize some of them until I renamed them to match the hint provided in YUMI. For instance, YUMI wanted the downloaded (still zipped, yet renamed to remove the ISO pre-extension) version of Memtest86+.

The installation process got interrupted partway through: I had to pull out the USB drive to use the jack for something else, and wound up killing YUMI and starting again. Neither Windows Explorer nor Windows Disk Management were able to see the drive at all when I reinserted it. This may have been due to not removing the USB drive properly.  I had to plug it into another computer, eject it from that computer, plug it back into the machine running YUMI, and kill and restart YUMI again, to get YUMI to see it again. At about the same time, I also noticed that YUMI would no longer make a program or other ISO (e.g., Ubuntu 12.04) available on its list, once that program was installed on the multiboot USB drive.  Also, YUMI now seemed not to be making any new files or folders on the USB drive, even though it was reporting that the various processes were completing successfully.  The ejecting and reinserting process also apparently fixed these problems:  now, as before, the programs already installed on the USB drive were no longer listed in YUMI, and I could see new things being added to the USB drive.

Windows Explorer seemed to tell me that the installation process was somewhat irregular, presumably due to the divergent demands of these various programs.  Many got their own subfolders, under the "multiboot" folder on the USB drive.  Hiren's Boot CD got its own folder on a higher level; UBCD was represented by just an ISO file in an "ISOS" folder on the USB drive; Balder FreeDOS seemed to have been installed as nothing more than a single file in the multiboot folder.

As noted above, I had to use the "Try an Unlisted ISO" option for a number of the programs listed above.  I used this, first, with the full Windows 7 DVD.  I decided to take this route, after first using the canned "Windows 7 installer" option because, as noted above, I was hoping to install several flavors of Windows.  When I used the canned installer option, the process took only a few seconds, suggesting that perhaps that option was just copying over the information needed for a system recovery approach.  But when I used the custom "Try an Unlisted ISO" option, YUMI indicated that it was copying 3 GB of material, and took several minutes to do it.

After installing Windows 7 on the multiboot USB drive, I used the Unlisted ISO option for the Windows System Repair CD.  That took only a few seconds.  The USB drive's ISOS folder now contained entries for both of those ISOs.  Same thing when I added Windows XP.  I proceeded likewise for the other unlisted programs noted above:  two flavors of Acronis, BartPE, MHDD, Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic, two varieties of Super Grub Disk, UBCD4Win, U.S. DOD LPS, and four hard drive diagnostic CDs.

I made some additional observations during these processes.  One was that the ISOs seemed to be copied verbatim into the ISOS folder.  It was possible that long filenames, or filenames containing spaces or odd characters, could cause problems for some programs.  In other words, looking ahead, I wondered whether it would have been to my advantage to rename some ISOs, at least temporarily, to something simpler.  During each installation, YUMI would report information of the following nature:

Creating Label MULTIBOOT on F:
Good Syslinux Exists...
A Previous Multiboot Installation was detected...proceeding to add your new selectio...
Copy to F:\multiboot\ISOS\Super Grub Disk.iso
Try an Unlisted ISO and its menu entry were added!
All Finished, Process is Complete!

Most of these processes took only a few seconds.  After all, these ISOs were mostly very small, containing just a utility program.  Instead of using the "Try an Unlisted ISO" option, I probably could have configured many of them as "Try an Unlisted ISO (Run from RAM)."  When I had finally worked through the foregoing list of programs to install and indicated that I was done, YUMI said,

YUMI has completed the installation.

Your Selections have been Installed on your USB drive.

Feel Free to run this tool again to Install more Distros.

YUMI will keep track of selections you have already Installed.

Windows Explorer > Properties indicated that the 16GB USB drive was now about 60% full (around 8.5GB used, out of 14.9GB actually available).  I exited YUMI, ejected the USB drive, put it into my laptop, and booted it.

Using the Multiboot USB Drive

When I booted the laptop with the USB flash drive (hitting Esc at the appropriate time to see the option of booting from that drive), I got the YUMI Multiboot USB screen.  It presented four options:  Linux Distributions, System Tools, Other Operating Systems and Tools, and Directly Bootable ISOs.  Under Linux Distributions, it showed me the two Ubuntus (10.10 and 12.04) and Knoppix.  So that part of the installation seemed to have worked.  Under System Tools, it showed me Clonezilla, DBAN, GParted, Parted Magic, Partition Wizard, Balder DOS image (FreeDOS), and Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD).  It had nothing under Other Operating Systems and Tools.  Finally, when I chose Directly Bootable ISOs, it said, "Launching GRUB," and then it showed me quite a list:  Windows 7, the Windows 7 Repair CD, Windows XP, two flavors of Acronis, BartPE, MHDD, four HDD diagnostics options (Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital), Windows Memory Diagnostic, two flavors of Super Grub Disk, UBCD4Windows, and US DOD LPS.  Collectively, these items accounted for everything on my original list except Hiren's Boot CD and Memtest86+.  I wasn't sure how those had slipped through the cracks.

I decided I wouldn't be able to run all of these programs at this point.  But I did want to try a few.  I started off with the full Windows 7 CD.  It worked.  I was able to go into its repair options and run CHKDSK on an external USB hard drive.  (I had to skip past some dialogs in which Windows expressed its interest in repairing my system.  I was not surprised that it was confused by what it found, and there seemed to be a good chance that it would make a mess of everything as a result, if I let it go ahead.)

After running CHKDSK on that external drive, I exited Windows 7 via its Restart option.  That put me back at the point of hitting Esc and seeing the YUMI Multiboot screen again.  This time, I tried Ubuntu 12.04.  I was able to use its copy of GParted to scan the laptop's internal and external hard drive.  GParted found problems with the laptop's C partition, so I retarted from within Ubuntu -- which, again, restarted the computer hardware rather than putting me back at the YUMI Multiboot screen, as might have happened in a virtual setup.  This time, I chose the Windows 7 System Repair CD, rather than the full Windows 7 DVD, and I was able to use that to run CHKDSK.

Next, I wanted to defragment the laptop's internal and external hard drives.  Of course, I could do that from within Windows after a normal boot, but it occurred to me that I didn't actually know, or recall, whether there were any defrag tools that could run from a non-Windows boot -- and, if there were such tools, I didn't know whether they would be included in any of the ISOs that I had installed on the Multiboot USB drive.  One thread indicated that Ubuntu, itself, did not have an NTFS-compatible defragger that would be advisable for use on an NTFS partition, especially on drive C, with the possible exception of ntfsfix.  So I looked instead at UBCD.  It seemed to be working -- its System Speed Test ran, producing a processor benchmark and other information -- but it did not seem to have anything for defragging, and it exited awkwardly, requiring a Ctrl-Alt-Del reboot.

BartPE appeared to have plugins that would defrag, so I tried that.  BartPE began to load, but then gave me a BSOD, requiring a hard reset.  That problem recurred on the second try.  BartPE did not seem to work, at least for purposes of this particular laptop.  It gave me a BSOD with STOP error code 7B.  As I watched it start to load, I was reminded that it used Windows XP, so I tried the Windows XP SP3 option from the Multiboot USB drive.  That gave me an Error 27 ("unrecognized command") in response to this command, apparently contained in the Multiboot CD:

find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /multiboot/ISOS/Windows XP SP3 Slipstreamed.iso

I was not able to determine whether the laptop would have accepted a CD in place of the USB drive, for purposes of booting WinXP, because I had no internal or external CD drive to try it with.  I could have tried a single-purpose USB drive containing only Windows XP, but at this moment I had insufficient time and interest to play with that.  My operating conclusion for the moment was that WinXP (therefore BartPE) did not work with this Multiboot USB drive on this machine.

Moving on, I looked to see if UBCD4Windows might have a defragger.  I noticed, in passing, that UBCD4Win contained a copy of DBAN (as did, I think, UBCD), so (if it worked) apparently I did not need to put a separate DBAN install on the USB drive.  UBCD4Win also had FreeDOS.  These options were available from its initial menu, and it appeared that I could add more.  I went into its menu option that would load UBCD4Win per se; I noticed, once again, that it relied on WinXP; and once again I got a BSOD.   As with BartPE, the STOP code was 7B.  A quick look at one troubleshooting guide seemed to indicate that WinXP and these other programs that used it (i.e., BartPE and UBCD4Win) might be failing to load updated drivers for the hard drive controller.  Another thread suggested going into the laptop's BIOS during bootup (F2 on my machine; DEL on some others) and changing the SATA setting from AHCI to Compatibility Mode.  I didn't seem to have exactly that option.  I did have one that was set as IDE->AHCI; I tried changing that to Native IDE.  It occurred to me, as I was doing that, that possibly I wouldn't be having this problem if I weren't trying to boot with the external USB hard drive connected; I had noticed that doing so tended to stall bootup on one of my desktop computers too.  Anyway, the AHCI change didn't help, and neither did booting with the external USB hard drive disconnected.  End of troubleshooting attempt.

I hadn't thought to verify whether the Windows 7 System Repair CD had a defragger.  I tried that now.  "DIR /S DEFRAG*.*" led to C:\Windows\System32\defrag.exe.  I tried it as "DEFRAG /C /H /M /U /X," but that didn't work.  It worked without the /M.  Apparently there was no "background" in the system repair mode.  (For details, type "DEFRAG /?")  So, OK, I did have an NTFS defragger on the Multiboot USB drive after all.  Only later would it occur to me that, by using the /C option, I might be asking the program to defrag the USB drive as well.  That concern faded, however, as the defragmentation went on . . . and on . . . and on.  Granted, defragmenting a fragmented 2TB drive can take a while.  And it did.  It took days.  I was not sure whether a Windows-based defragger would have taken just as long.  I had observed some pretty leisurely defragging operations from time to time.  But this was really a slow boat to China.

When the defragging was done, I decided to try running hard drive diagnostics.  The external USB hard drive was a Samsung.  When I tried to run the Samsung diagnostics that I had added to the Multiboot USB drive, however, I got the same "find --set-root" error as quoted above, except in this case it was referring to the Samsung HDD Diagnostics ISO, not the Windows XP ISO.  Basically, though, by this point it seemed that a lot of problems would be solved if they, or I, or someone could work through all the steps needed to make a Windows XP CD work on this USB drive.

And that's where I left it for now.  I had much of what I needed for the laptop on this one USB drive.  Until they improved Yumi and/or until I was able to troubleshoot the problems, I could perhaps get other ISOs to run from single-purpose USB flash drives apart from this multiboot one.  Despite the imperfections, these little devices had come a long way.

Thunderbird for Windows: Transition from Portable to Desktop; Duplicate Email Remover

I was using Thunderbird Portable 3.1.4 in Windows 7.  I wanted to use an add-on (Remove Duplicate Messages (Alternate) 0.3.6) to delete duplicate email messages.  I got the impression that it wouldn't run on the portable version.  I had been thinking about switching to the desktop version of Thunderbird anyway, and now seemed like the time.  To figure out how to transition from portable to installed versions of Thunderbird, I ran a search and found advice that seemed on point.  I did not precisely track all of the steps I took in this process, but the following is a pretty close approximation.

I started by installing regular (i.e., not portable) Thunderbird.  I think I created an email account at that point.  This generated C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\f0xqaflh.default.  (The f0xqaflh part was randomly generated -- other installations would have a different ????????.default file.)  I closed Thunderbird and moved C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\f0xqaflh.default to D:\Thunderbird\Profiles\f0xqaflh.default.  I put it on D so that it would be saved in case of Windows reinstallation.

Then I went to Start > Run > "thunderbird.exe -ProfileManager."  In Profile Manager, I clicked on Create Profile > Next > Choose Folder and pointed to D:\Thunderbird\Profiles.  I exited Profile Manager and moved the contents of ThunderbirdPortable\Data\profile (i.e., just the profile subfolder) to D:\Thunderbird\Profiles.  I clicked on my Start Menu shortcut for Thunderbird (not portable).  It ran, and it seemed that all of my emails were there.  I deleted the folder containing the portable version.

I hoped this was all I needed.  Now it was time to try to delete duplicate emails.  I installed the duplicate email remover add-on (Tools > Add-ons > Extensions tab > Install) and ran it (Tools > Remove Duplicates).  It wouldn't check my archive folder until I turned off the Skip Special Folders option (Tools > Add-ons > Extensions tab > Options > Message Comparison tab).  At first, I used the default comparison criteria in that same tab:  Author, Recipients, CC List, Message ID, Send Time, Size, Body, and Subject.  This did not identify too many duplicates, but it appeared they were exact duplicates, so I could delete them all without much manual comparison.  I ran another search, without the Message ID criterion, and yet another, without the Size comparison.  The former likewise seemed not to require much manual comparison; the latter did.  In other words, the final comparison criteria (Author, Recipients, CC List, Send Time, Subject) produced many alleged duplicates, some of which were of very different size.

The add-on did not allow me to open individual emails (via double-click or right-click), to see why two emails bearing the same subject, date, time, etc. would be so radically different in size, so I had to do a lot of manual toggling back and forth between the duplicate remover and Thunderbird, and then searching for individual items in T-bird, to check emails one by one.  In this regard, it was not like DoubleKiller, which I had found to be an excellent duplicate file finder.  But the manual selection process was similar:  check or uncheck the desired item under the "Keep?" column.  Both of these programs would probably have been easier to use if it had been possible to select or deselect items by clicking anywhere on the line, rather than having to mouse over to precisely the checkbox spot each time.

The add-on did allow arrow-key and spacebar navigation and selection.  Playing with this, I eventually discovered that the Enter key would open T-bird to one of the identified duplicate messages, but in that case the comparison window disappeared and I was back in Thunderbird, leaving me to wonder why I was now seeing only one of the duplicates.  Then I realized, oops, hitting the spacebar had not actually opened the selected duplicate; it had gone ahead and run the deletion.  Well, I hoped those 700 messages really were duplicates.  I had been verging toward just saying to hell with the time-consuming and awkward manual comparison process anyway; I just wasn't quite ready for this to happen.  I looked in Thunderbird's Trash folder and realized that I had not emptied the trash before running the duplicate checker (another ideal feature for the duplicate checker), so now I would have to restore not just the 700 messages that I had apparently just deleted, without an "Are you sure?" message, but would also have to restore about 700 other messages that were apparently in the Trash previously, since I was now seeing a total of 1400 messages there.  As I looked at the Trash, I found myself wondering, actually, what was wrong with those 700 other messages.  They didn't seem to be messages that I would have wanted to delete, unless they too were duplicates.  I decided to move the whole lot of them to the archive folder that I had been dup-checking.  At this point, needless to say, I was beginning to fear that I might just be turning my whole email archive into a giant hash.  I started back through a sequence of dup-checks, beginning with the most conservative (i.e., with the most comparison criteria checked), but of course this time I had no patience for checking individual items.  Instead, I just dreamt of an update that would actually display large thumbnails of alleged duplicates, right there in the add-on.

The column headings in the dup-check results window permitted sorting in ascending or descending order.  At first, I thought that feature was not working for some criteria.  Then I figured out that it was meant to sort only within a comparison.  For example, if Size was not a comparison criterion, it would not be in boldface in the top row, and then clicking on it would sort alleged duplicates according to size; but if Size was a comparison criterion, it would be bolded, and then clicking on that heading in the top row would do nothing, since in that case all duplicates within a set would be identical by definition.  It would have been helpful if selected comparison criteria headings had enabled a sorting of all pairs.  That is, if I was comparing by Send Time, I wanted to be able to show the earliest ones (i.e., the pairs of allegedly time-identical messages) first, so that I wouldn't have to do so much jumping-around when I toggled to Thunderbird for a manual comparison.

After running the several comparisons mentioned above, I tried running one with only the Send Time and Subject criteria checked.  This revealed some apparent duplicates whose only difference was that for some reason one item in a pair would be enclosed in quotation marks (e.g., a message from "Joe") while the other would not (e.g., a message from Joe).

That was the end of my use of the add-on at this point.  I returned to finish this post several hours after completing these processes.  It appeared, at that point, that the transition to desktop Thunderbird and the use of the add-on to delete duplicate emails were both successful.

Windows XP: Integrating the Start Menu with a Portable Apps Tree

I had come up with a tentative list of portable applications to use in Windows XP, and had arranged the program folders for those apps in a tree structure under five main categories:  Multimedia, Online, Productivity, Tools, and Miscellany.  The question for me was, how do I combine that hierarchy with the similar hierarchy that I used for the shortcuts in my Windows XP Start Menu?

That question arose because, if the two weren't combined, I would have to search in two separate places for a program that I wanted to run.  First, I would search my Start Menu; and then, I would search my set of portable apps.  Portable apps were, almost by definition, not ordinarily installed on the computer, and therefore did not tend to create their own shortcuts in the Start Menu.  So unless I created shortcuts for my portable apps (and went through the hassle of keeping the shortcuts up to date with the actual portable apps that I was finding and using), I would have the set of shortcuts installed in the Start Menu by the installed programs, and then I would have the separate set of portable apps.

(There were alternatives.  I had recently seen a program that would let me list the programs that I wanted to run, regardless of where they might be.  But that program hadn't looked very appealing to me.  Even if I didn't absolutely have to have a single set of programs and shortcuts, that was what made sense to me at this point.)

The concept, here, was that I would wind up with a single hierarchical Start Menu that would contain all of the shortcuts to my installed programs, plus all of the program folders for my portable apps.  Obviously, I would not want this to reside on drive C, where all my portable apps would be wiped out whenever I reinstalled Windows.  I had already moved my Start Menu to drive D.

The simple answer, of course, was just do it -- just combine the two, there on drive D.  The result would be relatively portable, as long as the machines where I used it would all use the default locations for program installation.  That is, the portable apps would run wherever -- I would be clicking directly on their executables -- and the shortcuts to installed programs would run too, as long as they were always installed in the same places, so that the shortcuts on my Start Menu could find them.  On machines where some programs weren't installed, or weren't installed in the right places, the shortcuts would simply fail to run.

With this plan in mind, I organized the combined set of portable app program folders and shortcuts into a single tree.  To get the system to see them, I added this to the registry:

; Set locations for Start Menu and special folders
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders]
"Start Menu"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu" 
"Programs"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs"
"Startup"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs\\Startup"
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders]
"Start Menu"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu" 
"Programs"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs"
"Startup"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs\\Startup"
"Administrative Tools"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs\\Miscellany\\Administrative Tools" 

With that registry change, right-clicking on the Start button and choosing Explore would open a copy of Windows Explorer in the new Start Menu location on D.  It did not work that way with right-clicking Start > Explore All Users, though.  That just put me in the traditional Start Menu location (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu).  I also found that additional program installations would put their Start Menu icons in the traditional location, and I would have to move them over to the new location by hand.  So apparently there were still some rough edges to smooth out.

Generally, though, I had the result I wanted.  I had a Start Menu that would not only be preserved on drive D when I reinstalled Windows, but would also be portable.  The programs on it would run on any machine, as long as either (a) they were genuinely portable apps (i.e., I was clicking on their executables) or (b) they were installed in the default locations on the computer where I was using this Start Menu.

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.

Exporting from Thunderbird, Importing into Thunderbird

I was using Thunderbird as my e-mail program in Ubuntu.  I decided to switch to using Thunderbird 3.1 for Windows as my e-mail program.  It seemed, at this writing, that most people who were transitioning to Thunderbird were going toward Ubuntu, not away from it.  So in this post I am writing up some things that I had to figure out along the way.

I decided to switch to Thunderbird for Windows because I was planning to keep Ubuntu as my underlying operating system, but to focus my applications on Windows XP, which I would be running in a virtual machine in VMware.  This arrangement, I found, gave me dual-boot advantages without having to reboot.

I was particularly interested in using the portable version of Thunderbird as my Windows XP e-mail application.  This would enable me to take my e-mail and my address book with me on a USB flash drive.  The discussion of Thunderbird for Windows in this post relates specifically to the portable version.

After setting up Thunderbird Portable on a Windows computer and making a backup copy, I went into Ubuntu and simply copied over my data.  I found the relevant data in Nautilus (i.e., Ubuntu's File Browser, the equivalent of Windows Explorer), in this location:  Home Folder / .thunderbird / 6abstqrst.default.  (The 6abstqrst part of that name was apparently generated at random, and as such would have a different name in other installations.  Point is, it's the "default" folder.)

I copied that entire default folder to a USB jump drive and compared its subfolders, item by item, to those on the computer where I had installed Thunderbird Portable.  (Of course, I did these and other folder manipulations (below) while Thunderbird was *not* running.)  The comparable e-mail account data seemed especially to be located under the Data\profile\Mail folder.  Thunderbird's Address Book seemed to be in Data\profile\abook.mab.  The Address Book copied and worked without any problem.  The following discussion focuses on problems in getting the e-mail accounts to work correctly.

The simple process of copying e-mail accounts over seemed to work well enough.  I copied all of the folders from Ubuntu via my jump drive to the corresponding Thunderbird folders on the Windows machine.  I kept backups and did this rather painstakingly.  After replacing the contents of one subfolder in Thunderbird Portable with the contents brought over from Thunderbird for Linux, I would start up Thunderbird Portable and make sure that it still seemed to be functioning OK.  Through this process, I ended up with a Thunderbird Portable setup where the desired e-mail accounts did exist.  This may have been helped by the decision to run Thunderbird's Tools > Import option, which I did somewhere along the way.

When I was done, unfortunately, the e-mail accounts that showed up when I ran Thunderbird Portable were still not showing the contents that I wanted them to show.  For example, my Hotmail account was there, but its Inbox was empty, whereas the Hotmail Inbox on Thunderbird for Linux had contained a dozen e-mail messages.  I could see, moreover, that the Data\profile\Mail\pop3.live.com folder contained an Inbox that was 96MB in size.  That was larger than I would have expected, and in any case much larger than an Inbox containing nothing, which is what Thunderbird Portable was showing me.

It seemed that Thunderbird Portable was recognizing the e-mail accounts themselves, but was drawing the contents of those accounts from the wrong place.  I verified this by removing the entire Mail subfolder from Thunderbird Portable.  When I started it up, it was still seeing the same few old items in the same accounts.  I thought it might have observed or figured out where I had moved the Mail folder, so I removed it from that computer entirely; yet Portable was still seeing those same ghostly remnants of some previous state of my Thunderbird for Linux installation.

It took a bit of effort to figure out where those ghostly remains were hanging out.  Portable wasn't drawing them from Data\profile\Cache; they persisted even after I emptied that.  To find the answer, I started Portable, changed the system date to a year in the future, copied one of those old e-mail messages from one folder to another, changed the system date back to the correct year, and exited Portable.  Then I copied the entire Portable folder to a workspace folder elsewhere on the computer, and searched for files bearing that future year's date.  Aside from cache files and scripts, there turned out to be only a handful of files dated in that future year.

That effort led to the discovery that the Data\profile\prefs.js file that I had brought over from Ubuntu was not suited for Windows.  I went to the original backup of my Thunderbird for Windows Portable and copied its prefs.js file to the Portable installation that I was tinkering with, thus overwriting the Ubuntu prefs.js file.  Both of them began with a warning:  "Do not edit this file."  Instead, the warning said, I could follow the instructions provided on a webpage that, as it turned out, was no longer in existence.  A different webpage did advise me to edit prefs.js directly.  Again, of course, I would want to do this while Thunderbird was not running; and if there was any doubt about that, Windows Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del > Processes tab) would confirm whether there was an instance of thunderbird.exe or ThunderbirdPortable.exe currently running.

I opened prefs.js in Notepad, widened the Notepad window to prevent lines from wrapping, and took a look.  I decided I didn't know exactly how to edit prefs.js, so I tried the alternative that the instructions at the top of prefs.js seemed to prefer:  I started Firefox, typed about:config in the address line, and looked to see what was there.  (Note that I did not have any other copies or versions of Thunderbird installed on that computer, else things could have become very confusing.)  I searched for instructions, and eventually realized that it might not make sense to use about:config to change system preferences for a portable program.

So I tried another search.  This led to a webpage that led, eventually, to a mozillaZine webpage that advised me to start over and try using the Kaosmos ImportExportTools utility.  So I made a fresh start, replacing my munged-up Thunderbird Portable with a copy of the backup, and then I installed the ImportExportTools utility as instructed.  Then, in Thunderbird Portable, I went to Tools > ImportExportTools > Import mbox file.  At this point, I had to ask myself:  What, exactly, is an mbox file?  A search led to the discovery that mbox is an e-mail storage format that didn't seem very relevant to Thunderbird's own storage format

To test this, I went ahead with where I was in the ImportExportTools process:  I selected the "Select a directory where searching the mbox files to import (also in subdirectories)" option, and pointed it toward the top level of the folder I had copied over from Ubuntu Thunderbird.  To my surprise, the tool asked me if I wanted to import various programs.  I said no to parentlock and yes to all the other folders it asked me about.  After asking me about those folders, it didn't seem to be doing anything, except that I could see movement in the green progress bar at the bottom of the screen.  When it seemed to be finished, I didn't see any change in Thunderbird's list of folders.  I killed and restarted Thunderbird.  Still no change.  I poked around and then, whoa, I discovered that it had imported everything, including my archives, into the Hotmail Inbox folder (not the actual online one -- just the copy of it that Thunderbird keeps).  I killed T-bird again, made a backup copy of this remarkable state of Thunderbird Portable, restarted the program, and began moving and rearranging folders.

This was looking good, but there were still some things to fix.  First, in T-bird Portable, I tried sending a message that I had kept in the Hotmail drafts folder in Thunderbird for Ubuntu.  I got this message:

Send Message Error
Sending of message failed.
An error occurred sending mail.  Unable to establish a secure link with SMTP server smtp.live.com using STARTTLS since it doesn't advertise that feature.  Switch off STARTTLS for that server or contact your service provider.

A search and then a refined search led to the quick answer that I just had to stop my avast! antivirus software from scanning outgoing messages.

Next, I wanted to get rid of some Local Folders, especially the Inbox and Outbox.  I found a thread that made me think these folders were a product of Smart Folders, which would supposedly combine all of my e-mail inboxes into one Inbox, etc.  I did not want this.  Actually, I wasn't sure this was even the correct explanation, because I was seeing new incoming messages in my Hotmail Inbox, and they were not being mirrored in my Local Folders Inbox.  The advice I got from Yahoo! Answers, usually a font of goofy bewilderment, was as follows:

You can't remove the Smart Folders account using Tools -> Account Settings. You need to either edit prefs.js with a text editor or use the Config editor to delete the account from mail.accountmanager.accounts.

I was inclined to believe this because I had just run across another webpage with more or less the same conclusion.  But the advice on that webpage was oriented toward deleting all local folders, whereas I was using the Local Folders heading as the place to park my e-mail archive.  I right-clicked and saw, from Properties, that Outbox folder was located at Data\profile\Mail\Local Folders\Unsent Messages.  I quit T-bird, made a backup copy of the whole T-bird Portable folder, went into that Local Folders folder in Windows Explorer, and deleted the Unsent Messages entries.  I then restarted T-bird.  No joy.  As expected, the Outbox was still there and the Unsent Messages entries were back.  A new search led to a blanket statement that you could not delete the Outbox because it served an essential function, different from a Drafts folder:  it held messages that the user had tried to send but (because of e.g., no Internet connection) had not yet actually been sent.

So I turned to the next problem arising from the import into Thunderbird Portable for Windows.  I now had two top-level folders appearing at the left side of the T-bird window.  One was for my Hotmail account; the other was for Local Folders.  There should have been a third one, for another e-mail account that had appeared as a top-level folder in T-bird in Ubuntu.  This seemed to be a simple matter of going into T-bird Portable > File > New > Mail Account and entering the information about the account as it was recorded in T-bird for Ubuntu.  But the Mail Account Setup process stayed stuck for a long time on "Looking up configuration:  Trying common server names."  I finally went into Manual Setup and got it working that way.  And with that, the project was done.  I had transitioned from Thunderbird (Ubuntu) to Thunderbird Portable for Windows.

Making Microsoft Office 2003 Portable

I had discovered that many Windows XP applications came in portable form, or could be made portable, and I had decided that portability had some advantages for me.  In the process of transitioning toward greater use of portable apps, I came across the question of whether Microsoft Office 2003 could be made portable.  This post describes my investigation into that question.

Normally, I would just install Office from the CD, and by default it would do its installation thing on drive C.  Alternatively, I had found that I could download copies of Office 2003 that people had converted into portable format.  These presumably pirated versions seemed to carry the risks of being unstable or nonworking, and also of infecting my computer with viruses when I downloaded or ran them.

The more intriguing possibility was to use an application virtualization tool designed to create my own portable version of Microsoft Office (or of other installed software, for that matter).  Among the many virtualization tools listed in Wikipedia, I wanted WinXP-compatible freeware.  This amounted to a search for information on Cameyo, FilePacker, and JauntePE.  In a relatively brief inquiry, depending heavily on the slickness of the developer's webpage, I got the impression that Cameyo (although still in beta) was the best-developed of the three, so I started with that.

I found descriptions of Cameyo's virtualization process at DotTech and Addictive Tips; I also found at least some potential for support in Cameyo's own thinly developed forums.  The basic idea was that, when I ran Cameyo, it took a pre-installation snapshot of my entire system.  Then it wanted me to install the program that I wanted to package (i.e., Office 2003).  Then it would run a post-installation snapshot, and give me the package.

The DotTech article seemed to say that installing the whole Office 2003 suite at once would cause a problem:  all of the programs in it would run anytime I tried to start any one of them.  So that wasn't a great prospect.  The better idea seemed to be to package just one Office 2003 program at a time.  I decided to start with Microsoft Word 2003.  For that purpose, the first question was, what should be included in a complete installation of Word?  The first thing, of course, was Word itself, along with the relevant updates downloaded from Microsoft.  So that's where I started, with Cameyo running.  (I was doing these tests in clones of a clean new virtual machine (VM) running in VMware Workstation 7.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.)

When I installed Word, I chose the advanced/custom installation option, and indicated that I wanted to install everything under Microsoft Office Word (but nothing under any other program), along with the default Office Shared Features and Office Tools.  When the installation finished, I had the option of removing setup files from drive C.  I decided to keep them, even though space on a USB drive would be relatively limited, because I certainly wouldn't want to have to go hunting for a setup CD when I was off somewhere, relying upon my USB drive.  I was relieved that none of the updates required a reboot; then again, I noticed that Cameyo's dialog box said, "If installation requires reboot, simply reboot" -- so apparently it would just keep right on recording on reboot.

After that, the next step in the Word installation process, for me, was to install the converter pack from the Office 2003 Resource Kit.  I used the AutoCorrect.dot macro to restore my large collection of word corrections and abbreviations.  I also used the Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard to restore various configuration adjustments that I had made and saved from a previous Office 2003 installation.  For some reason, it did not restore all of those adjustments.  For instance, in Word's Tools > Options > File Locations, I had to reset the preferred locations for files.  To automate this for future reference, I took Regshot pictures of drive C before and after making those changes, and saved the difference as .reg files for possible use in some future installation.

At that point, I clicked the "Install done" button on Cameyo.  It spent quite a while taking a post-installation snapshot, as I had heard it would -- a half-hour, I would say, though I didn't time it.  When Cameyo was done, it just sort of disappeared.  I wasn't sure where it had saved the finished product.  The only two options in the Start menu were Capture Software Installation and Package Editor.  I had already done the former.  When I tried the latter, it gave me an blank window with File as the only menu pick.  I tried File > Open.  It defaulted to its own program folder, and there was nothing there related to the Office 2003 portable executable file that I was hoping to find.  Nothing in My Documents, nothing on the Desktop.  When I restarted Cameyo, it showed nothing under "Recent Packages."   It didn't seem like others were having this problem, so I posted a question on it in the Cameyo forum.

While I was waiting for a reply, I did what I probably should have done in the first place:  I uninstalled Word 2003 and prepared to reinstall it, again with Cameyo watching, but this time I didn't plan to continue on with the time-consuming process of installing updates.  Instead, I planned to do a quick installation of Word 2003 by itself, just to try it out.  But now Cameyo wasn't wanting to cooperate.  It crashed three times in a row while trying to do its pre-installation scan.  That may have been related to a problem with the operating system.  I was doing this stuff in VMware virtual machines (VMs), and this particular one became unstable.

So I tried again in a new VM.  It was a clone of a newly created WinXP installation, with virtually no prior program installation or uninstallation, so I didn't expect any more operating system issues.  I installed Cameyo in this new VM, set it up to capture, and proceeded to install Word.  This time, it ended differently.  After its ending snapshot, it gave me a dialog labeled "Main Executable."  This dialog asked me to provide the name of the application, to say where I wanted to save it, and to identify its main executable, i.e., the program that I wanted to run "when the package is opened."  Under that last question, it gave me about ten choices.  First on the list, and the correct answer, was WINWORD.EXE.  Other possibilities included OIS.EXE (Microsoft Office Picture Manager) and MSPSCAN.EXE (Microsoft Office Document Scanning).  I wasn't sure what it took for an .exe to make it onto that list.  Maybe these were programs that had run during the setup process.  I noticed that PROFLWIZ.EXE (the Save My Settings Wizard) was also on the list.

After I filled in those blanks and selected WINWORD.EXE, I got an indication that Cameyo's Packager was building the package, and then it said, "Success.  Package successfully saved in" the directory that I had named.  I went to that directory and took a look.  There, I saw a file named MicrosoftOfficeProfe.WINWORD.virtual.exe.  Its size was 6,361KB (i.e., 6.2MB).  That seemed pretty slim.  I wondered whether it did somehow contain references to other Word installation files on that computer.  I also noticed that this completed job was not listed in Cameyo's list of Recent Packages.  I renamed the file to be Portable Microsoft Word 2003, and tried running it right where it was.  I got a dialog:

Fatal
Cannot find RESOURCE_COREZIP

So, OK.  Not a good sign.  I did a search for that file and concluded that it was telling the truth:  I couldn't find RESOURCE_COREZIP either.  I wondered if renaming had caused the problem, so I changed its name back to the longer original form and tried again.  But no, I still got the same Fatal message.  So was I perhaps supposed to include most if not all of those other programs (e.g., MSPSCAN.EXE) in the final package after all?

So far, I wasn't too impressed with Cameyo, and I was also starting to have some questions about how (or whether) this packaging concept would work, for a program that needed to be changed from time to time, as was the case with Word.  I mean, would I be able to adjust its settings, and would any changes that I made be preserved?  Suppose, for example, that I wanted to add another AutoCorrect item to my list.  Suppose I was doing a lot of work for the International Delegation of Information and Operations Training System, and I hated typing all those words:  I just wanted to designate a shortcut (IDIOTS) and let that expand into the full name.  I'd type IDIOTS, hit the spacebar, and, boom, AutoCorrect would do its magic and give me that whole long name instead.  Could I add that to the packaged Word, or not?

Ideally, I would have tested that in Word itself.  But since I wasn't getting too far on that front, I tried Cameyo again, this time using a simpler program as a proxy.  So I used Cameyo while installing IrfanView 4.0 and its plugins.  Cameyo's packager crashed while trying to do its initial snapshot, so I tried again.  When installation finished, I went into IrfanView's Options menu and took a look at some of the default settings.  Then I went to Cameyo's packager and clicked "Install done."  It took its post-installation snapshot and gave me the "Main Executable" dialog again.  This time, though, it didn't name any main executables at all, and it also wouldn't let me type in the path to where the newly installed IrfanView executable was.  So I named a folder where I wanted it to save the main executable and clicked OK, and again it reported Success.  But there wasn't anything to run in the target folder, so I think Failure would have been the more appropriate report.

So I was done with Cameyo.  I noticed that JauntePE had gotten a number of mentions on PortableApps.com, whereas FilePacker had not, and anyway I had started out with the impression that JauntePE was considered a leading if imperfect entrant in this field.  So now I tried JauntePE.  I downloaded both the alpha executable and an apparently accompanying set of runtimes and unpackaged them both on a clean new VM.  Then I ran JauntePE.exe.  It admitted it was an incomplete program.  I clicked on its "house" icon, which I took to be the home or starting point.  That seemed to be where I was already -- nothing happened -- so I tried the next icon, showing "tools."  Nothing happened.  Third icon:  the tooltip said this was the JPE Quickie option, which the home screen had said was where I should start.  I ran JPE Quickie.  In its first screen, it gave me the option of naming an installer or an application already installed, and also the option to "leave intact any Quickie portable data [or discovery data, whatever that was] from previous runs" -- suggesting that, with JauntePE, perhaps I could indeed start up from where I had left off, after making subsequent adjustments to my Word 2003 installation.  I took a look at Quickie's Settings tab, but wasn't really clear on what most of them were about, so I just left them as they were.

So I clicked "Run Portably" and then "Run Normally" to run Quickie with the IrfanView setup executable.  It did its thing and gave me an error message:  "Unhandled Error."  I clicked OK from that.  Then it showed me the IrfanView installation screen; but after a moment, that crashed.  This was unexpected:  IrfanView had always installed for me without any problems.  I canceled out of that and tried "Run Portably" again.  Now I got a message indicating that JauntePE could not access a certain discovery mode output file.  It said, "If you have corrected the problem, click OK, otherwise Cancel."  I hadn't corrected anything, so I clicked Cancel.  Despite the error, which was apparently not serious, JauntePE proceeded to try to install IrfanView again.  It gave me the same Unhandled Error message, and again the IrfanView installer crashed.

Well.  JauntePE was alpha software, after all.  If it was having this much trouble with IrfanView, I hated to think what it might be like to try to portabilize Office 2003 with it.  I skipped on to FilePacker.  Unlike JauntePE, FilePacker was not a portable app.  It installed to drive C.  I ran it.  It was simple.  It created a 7MB executable.  I ran that.  It opened up the IrfanView installation dialog.  So basically (as the writeups had already more or less explained) the concept of FilePacker was just that it would combine, into one package, all of the executables you designated; and when you ran that one package, it would run those executables, or at least one of them.  It wouldn't actually give you a ready-to-use portable application.

So far, JauntePE had come closest to offering (although not providing) what I wanted:  a portabilizer that would also seemingly allow me to include subsequent updates, changes in program settings, and other adjustments, without having to go back through the whole setup process from the beginning.  Ideally, it would also be slickly packaged, so that I wouldn't have to do a lot of research to figure out, by trial and error, how I should have answered this or that question during the setup process.

Apparently I was going to have to pay for a program that would do that.  Looking again at Wikipedia's article on portable application creators, I decided against the category of programs that would require something to be installed on the host machine, in favor of those that created true portable (i.e., standalone) apps.  This meant that I was opting against U3, PackageFactory, and MojoPac,.  For instance, the developer's webpage said, "MojoPac requires the host PC be logged in with administrative privileges or have MojoPac Usher installed."  I also wasn't looking for the creation of an entire virtual environment from my USB drive, which was what both MojoPac and Ceedo Personal offered.  A review by nc10 said that, unfortunately, in MojoPac, any software with a copy protection scheme tied to a particular computer (including specifically Microsoft Office) would fail to operate on other computers.  Also, I didn't want to be dependent on Microsoft, so that eliminated Microsoft Application Virtualization, and I didn't want to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars, which meant I wouldn't be using BoxedApp Packer, Spoon Studio, LANDesk Application Virtualization, InstallFree Bridge, or VMware Thinapp.

It seemed, at this point, that the market for heavy-duty portabilizers was still immature.  Even if I was willing to pay up to $100, I was going to have to wait, probably for a couple of years, to find a selection of high-quality programs that would crunch something like Word 2003 into a single package that I could just carry around and run on any Windows computer, and could also update without having to go back through the whole setup process.  I did decide to try Ceedo Personal, by the way.  The story of that investigation is in a separate post.  In a word, it only reinforced this sense of market immaturity.

To sum up, there seemed to be some ways in which Office 2003 could become portable.  That development might require nothing more than the emergence of a better version of, or competitor to, the programs cited above.  While I did not think that the market for such programs would mature within the next year, I could hope that at least one affordable, robust application of this nature would emerge within months.  At present, however, it appeared that I could not make a portable version of Microsoft Office 2003.