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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

Very silly question : I'm used to "portable" as applied to code (meaning it does not need a lot of changes to be run on different architecture) ; and in French, "portable" is the colloquial term for "mobile phone". But what does "portable" mean in this context ?

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not requiring installation. (meaning you can bring a USB drive full of useful tools with you and use on random PCs)

for clarification, as you know for sure, but others maybe don't: ... and keeping all the settings on the USB drive too.

//edit: typo

Good point! Yes, the expectation for a "portable" program is to run entirely out of its current folder, not requiring or leaving files elsewhere, my answer didn't cover that.

An ideal portable app for me also does not require admin to run.

> not requiring installation

It's a strange quirk of Windows that when you install a new piece of software, it will ask you in the wizard where you want to store it (C: drive or D: drive). D: is usually an external hard-drive, and so I select that. But the D: drive can magically become the E: drive in some cases when you have other media inserted like an SD card. So this is why I prefer portability since the path is agnostic and portable software doesn't care about drive letters.

tip: IIRC you can set partitions to specific "folders" rather than drive letters by using Windows' Disk Management tool.

Yes, as Mount Points. When you partition and format storage in Disk Management, it asks you what drive letter you want to assign, and that dialog has the option to alternatively specify a folder on an existing disk instead.

Carry your flash storage to each of the PCs you may come across throughout your day.

How do you deal with PCs that have disabled USB drives ?

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