I am a dyed-in-the-wool freeware junky. With three desktops
and a laptop in the house, one is totally freeware .. except
for Win98se. But, I did apply 98Lite and untricate MSIE
and Outlook Express.
But I got caught up in the thread of what to carry around
on my 512MB thumbdrive. I employ a technique that may not
be entirely kosher to a lot of a.c.f. lurkers. For those
freeware items that I consider indispensible, and use
daily on a regular basis, I found that most installation
packages contain far, far more fileage than is necessary
to use the program. I discovered that I can delete such
things as the undelete files (as I know how to do so without
them). The installation procedure itself has parts not
necessary for the operation of the main feature. The bottom
line is: I often find that the main executable file is a
standalone, no other files needed. Or, sometimes there are
only one or two other .DLL (etc) that need to be available
for the executable to function. By putting those directly
into the same folder with the concerned executable where
they can be found by that executable, negates the need to
have such .DLL files 'installed' in my registry data.
So .. when filling up my thumbdrive, I merely determine
what is meat & potatoes (so to speak), and do away with the
chaff. As an example, PSPad is a favorite, and needs only
the main executable and the (English) LANG sub-dir .. it
zips to a package of 1.6 MB. As other examples, I store
only the executables of, ASPack106, ContextEdit, Lister,
Resource Hacker, 1-4 Rename, TurboNavigator .. and many
more. When further compressed by ASPack most of these
single-file standalones take up tiny spaces.
I just wonder if I am alone in packing my thumbdrive very
tight indeed with these re-packed and abbreviated programs?
