This thing bugging me for month actually… It’s annoying to see more and more people uses Thinstall to create portables. Not that I have anything against Thinstall, but, check this out from Thinstall website:

Thinstall supposedly for these peoples:

- Corporate IT
- ISV & Software Publishers

and it should stay that way. But with available hacked trial of Thinstall Virtualization Suite and cracks/patches on the Internet, anybody that can get their hands on those files can make portable, and I mean CAN make portable because the simplicity of Thinstall.

After seeing some of those Thinstalled apps, these newbies, they never tried to make an app portable the normal way, EVEN if the app works just fine normal way. The main purposes of Thinstall (AFAIK) are:

1) deploy app without footprints on host PC with Isolation & Sandboxing
2) In the portable world, means that virtually almost all apps can be made portable (for example, M$ Office)

So these peeps, they just fire up Thinstall, pre-scan, install the apps and post-scan. Then they click on Build.bat to create the output EXE. Sure, it was an easy task, 1 2 3… right… but does they realize, if Thinstall ceases to exist, what they’ll depend on next? So they’ll be useless without the help of Thinstall. Almost every single app that they can find will be converted into portable using Thinstall, even the good-old Winamp 2.x and other app like UltraISO (which I think is not hard to make it portable NORMAL way)

In other hands, if you at least learned one of the other ways making portables, you always have alternatives. Most great portable makers I’ve known (and some I barely knowns) know at least one alternatives such as through AutoIT, batch scripting etc.

In my humble opinion, I think people that only know making portables with Thinstall are people that didn’t uses their brain. Everything has been taken care of by Thinstall, from files placements, shared dlls and registries. You brain will only uses maybe 0.000000001% to instruct your finger to left-click the mouse on the Build.bat file. That way, you’ll never learned problem-solving and will always depend on the others to solves your problem.

In other method, sure you’ll spend alot of times in fronts of your PC try making them working, but that’s what making your brain functioning. You’ll face with every problems you can encounter with particular app and learned to solve it the hard-earned way…

Well, that was my 2 cents to share with you guys, if you guys didn’t agree with me or want to comments, please do reply. I would love to see some discussion about this…

Starting from today, if you would like to receive an e-mail notifications when I added/updated portables here, please leave your e-mail addresses below. All e-mails from me are guaranteed free of spam

In the past few days, it seems like some of my portables are not working correctly to some people that downloaded it. If you DO encounter error when running my portables, please report it to me. I will either:

a) try to fix the error and repost the app
b) nuke it and try to find another version that work properly

and FYI, I never tested my portables outside my computing environment, I only have 1 PC at home, so to quality check those portables, I used *virtual computers* with specs below:

1) Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 - CPU: P4 3.0GHz; RAM: 140Mb; OS: WinXP SP2
2) VMWare Workstation 5.x - CPU: P4 3.0GHz; RAM: 128Mb; OS: WinXP SP2
3) VirtualBox - CPU: P4 3.0GHz; RAM: 130Mb; OS: WinXP SP2

but of course above it’s not enough. So if you found any errors, report with any error text or info so I can track where the error might occured, repair it (if possible) and update you with working, no-bullshit portables!

:P

Well, it’s been quite a busy day for me to catch up with works and this portable blog. But hey, I’m happy with it because this way, not only I can help people get portables they want (if I can make it though) but also it’s like a satisfaction when I made portables. More harder it to make, more time I’ll spend in front of my computer screen until either I get it finished or I’ll give up (if it’s too difficult)

2000+ visitor (not unique obviously… LOL!) has been visiting my blog for the past 6 days and it’s not bad for a starter. I hope this blog will continue to serves portables as long as I can. Keep coming and check out my latest releases.

I maybe going to take a break for a while and I’ll come with more portables. Until then, I’m signing out, phew…