Archive for December, 2008

PeerAware portable edition

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

Just recently I became aware of that Google’s new browser did something peculiar with their installer. They did not install into the standard “Program Files” folder, rather they installed the program into \users\username\appdata\local\google\.

My first thought was that yes, this is a nice way to avoid requiring admin privileges. And Microsoft has stated that it is just bad programming that makes so many programs require admin privileges. On the other hand it does undermine the IT departments strict security policies. But then again, I don’t really care about that, I believe users are capable of managing their own computers just fine. And I certainly want to let any user try out PeerAware.

And of course, here it is: PeerAware portable edition.

What is great about this is that it requires no admin privileges, does not write to the registry and does not run any services. And all settings are kept in the same folder as the program itself.

The bad thing is that for now it does not have autostart and does not discover nearby workspaces. On the other hand, if you know what a portable edition of a program is I am pretty sure you will be able to to make this work for you.

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