When was the last time you ...

[guinness]

... gave your Portable folder a spring clean?

I'm in the process of reducing the amount of applications I have from 600+ to a manageable 140 and as you can guess I haven't done a major update in over a year now, well except for the main applications like Opera & AutoIt. So as I go through the boring and quite frankly tedious** process of tidying up the folder structure (and WebVersions - does anyone still use this?) I wonder when was the last time you re-organised your Portable folder?

The reason for this major change was having 14 utilities to 'Tweak XP' (which I don't use any more) seemed a little excessive as well as having an application to move the minimise, maximise and close buttons to the left side! I knew then I has applications that weren't required anymore. I also noticed that a lot of applications can now be replaced with NirSoft's utilities and using Windows System Control Center to update.

** - If it wasn't for AutoIt the process would be that much more difficult than it is.

[joby_toss]

I'm constantly adding/removing apps from my Portable Heaven Folder.

[freakazoid]

600 is a little insane

I have around 250 and even I think that's too much!

[m^(2)]

Never. When I realize I don't need something, it goes out immediately.

[guinness]

600 is a little insane

I have around 250 and even I think that's too much!

Couldn't agree more, this is a combination of 5 years and refusing to delete applications in 'case I need them for the future.' But for the last 12 months I've only been using a core group of Portable applications so figured that those applications I 'might need,' I don't!

[webfork]

On a similar note ...

I've actually been wanting to ask this for a while now: are there any tools out there that will check portable software to clean up temp file usage (ala CCleaner / BleachBit) for portable apps? Is that even needed?

[guinness]

You can add entries to winapp2.ini for use with CCleaner & BleachBit, though I've never tried it myself. Otherwise create a script/batch to tidy the specific entries of your Portable drive.

[I am Baas]

Same as joby_toss & m^(2), constantly adding/deleting portable applications. You are absolutely right re. Nirsoft. I am using Nirlauncher (trimmed down version).

[SYSTEM]

Never.

I have more than enough space for portable applications. Currently 3,4 gigabytes of my portable software partition (16 GB) is in use, and the drive contains over 500 GB of unallocated space.

In addition, the number of portable applications I use is rather low (about 55) and they are well organized, so I don't have big problems managing my software collection.

(and WebVersions - does anyone still use this?)

I do.

[guinness]

Does anyone use 'Scripts' to manage their 'Portable Heaven' (as Joby said)?

I do.

Nice

[dany]

Does anyone use 'Scripts' to manage their 'Portable Heaven' (as Joby said)?

Yea, but minimal and mostly in batch. I try to reserve it only for temporary hacks in the hope they'll get fixed in future releases. Like with PhotoFiltre7 recently, which writes to the registry. But managing applications themselves, not really.
I've used WebVersions in the past, but actually I use the PFC rss feed as my main updater If programs have their own update checker I'll run that too once in a while.
As far as my Portable Heaven goes, I run new downloads from /new and once I find myself using them a lot, they get moved over to /bin. /new gets cleaned once a week or so.
There are always these edge cases that pop up once a year that need a very specialised program, and sometimes I end up keeping them because of that very same reason, but overall I don't have artifacts lying about.
'Portable Heaven' would be a cool name btw for a portable applications manager

[webfork]

You can add entries to winapp2.ini for use with CCleaner & BleachBit, though I've never tried it myself. Otherwise create a script/batch to tidy the specific entries of your Portable drive.

Anyone know how to get winapp2.ini to work in BleachBit? According to their site, you just check the box and restart the program, but I'm not seeing any difference.

Edit: Resolved -- a second restart seemed to do it. That was odd.

[Napiophelios]

I dont know many times I end up needing an out dated app for referance and regret deleting them.
So I started an archive for older versions and portables I have out grown on an external usb drive.
I have a core of about fifty apps I use regularly;but I dont delete them any more.

[guinness]

So I think I've finally completed the boring task of reducing 600+ applications down to around 80 or so with 20 being the main applications I use on a weekly basis. In the process I realised that a lot of applications could double up as additional tools, for example take Defraggler (believe it or not) has a host of additional features for checking a drive's health and is not limited just to defragging a drive, shows how much I've paid attention to the changelog