From all that I’ve written so far in this guide you could think that every attempt to create a portable version of a software would be crowned with success. But unfortunately it’s not true. Even if you’re an experienced portable creator, there will be many cases when you simply can’t get the portable version to work.
However, there are signs of possible future failures when you start creating the portable:
• Setup installs a service
• Setup installs a driver
• Software protection is based on hardware ID (so the portable you create won’t work on other computers because the hardware ID is not the same as on your computer)
• The software is heavily tied to the registry (hundreds or even thousands of registry keys – although in these cases it is possible to create a working portable version but it can be a really hard work)
• The launcher should copy too many files to the host computer. For example, copying some 100 MB of data before launching the main exe would take a lot of time. Again, it is possible to get it work but the portable will be hell slow.
•.NET or Java is required to run the software (see topic 11 “.NET and Java” in this chapter)
•Etc.
As I wrote before, if the user has no admin rights he or she may not be able to run the portable. So if you have a chance to decide how to make the portable, make it that way that users without admin rights could also use it.
[...] 13. Failures [...]