Emka's favorites (43)

NOTE: Recent press about CCleaner indicates it may represent a privacy concern.

CCleaner is a feature-rich system optimization and privacy tool. The program cleans unused, temporary and log files from your system, as well as traces of online activities such as Internet history and flash cookies. The program contains startup controls for Windows, major internet browsers and context menu entries. Includes a separate registry cleaner, duplicate search, system restore tool and can wipe both deleted files and drive free space for security.

A 64-bit version is available (within the folder). Monitoring functions are only available in the pro version.

Additional cleaner rules can be using an unofficial set of community-developed set. It should be noted that many of these rules are alpha and the developers will not provide support for these rules, a thread in the users forum is dedicated to supporting the add-on rules.

Alternatively, ccPortable is also available.

foobar2000 is an audio player with low memory footprint and native support for most popular audio formats. It includes CD ripping, format conversion, replay gain, audio normalization, equalization and more. Playlist display and keyboard shortcuts are both very customisable. Additional functionality available via a wide variety of plugins.

The program can edit song tags (album and song name, number, year etc.) based on the FreeDB Internet database and even rename the original songs based on these tags. A file format conversion tool is available, but must be enabled with external downloads. Can even fix some MP3s with corrupted file headers.

Windows 2000 users can download the last compatible version: 0.9.4.
Windows XP and Vista users, download last version from 1.5 series.

WinScan2PDF is a very small program for scanning documents and saving them on your computer as a PDF by using any installed scanner.

LibreOffice is a complete productivity suite including word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, database, drawing tool and more. Includes strong compatibility for 100s of file formats including Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio etc.). The program is similar to OpenOffice, a program that it was derived from, but has added many new features and improvements.

LibreOffice Portable is a special build developed in conjunction with the publisher. On systems without Java installed, some functions such as document creation wizards and the Base database application etc. can be enabled by adding jPortable, though this is optional and can be skipped if those functions are not needed. Alternatively, X-LibreOffice (64-bit version) is also available.

Other available portable versions:

• Still - more tested and stable but with fewer features/capabilities
• Legacy - for WinXP/Vista users (unsupported)

XMedia Recode is an audio/video converter for most popular formats and includes handy profiles for popular mobile/tablet devices such as iPod, iPhone, Samsung, SonyEricsson, Zune, PSP, Blackberry, LG etc. These profiles include file format, screen size and other details chosen specifically for a given player.

Support many formats.

Note: Back when FFMPEG's hall of shame for licensing issues still existed, this program was a member there due to this issue.

CrystalDiskInfo monitors disk health status and temperature, monitoring/graphing of S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic information. The program also tells you how many times the hard disk has been turned on and how many hours.

Functional with magnetic and solid state disks.

FocusWriter is a full-screen word processor that aims for a distraction-free, immersive way to write and edit. The minimalist interface puts options and tools on the edge of the screen and auto-saves progress. Upon relaunch, the program reloads your last file to make make it easy to jump back into your work.

Alternatively, FocusWriter Portable is stealth and automatically adjusts paths.

Money Manager Ex is a personal finance software that helps you to organize your finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a great tool to get a bird's eye view of your financial worth. Cross-platform with clients available for Mac, Linux, and Android.

Alternatively, Money Manager Ex Portable is stealth, portablizes the recently used files list and allows the last used file to automatically open. A winPenPack version is also available.

VLC is a skinnable, feature-rich media player that supports a wide variety of multimedia file and streaming formats. It can play files while they download, from inside RAR files, online radio stations, convert video formats and much more.

The software can also behave as a streaming server for delivering video in unicast or multicast mode.

SumatraPDF is a lightweight, tabbed document reader for a variety of formats. Includes a wide variety of views including table of contents, rotation, facing pages, book view (2 pages side-by-side), full screen and presentation mode. Includes support for bookmarks, command-line arguments, hotkeys, and more. Additionally, SumatraPDF can function as a portable browser plugin. Supported formats include PDF, eBooks (EPUB, MOBI, FB2/FB2Z, PDB, TCR), Comic Books (CBZ/CBR/CBT/CB7Z), DJVU, CHM, XPS, TXT, images (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, J2K, WEBP, TGA) and PostScript documents (PS/EPS, AI, PRN - requires Ghostscript).

Alternatively, Sumatra Portable adjusts recently used and most used file paths.

7-Zip is an archive manager that can view and create a wide variety of formats. The program includes folder favorites, optional two-pane view, checksum calculator, file split/combine capability and more. Individual archives can be created with high speed or high compression settings, update options (including update, add/replace, synchronize), split volumes and more. Archives can be secured with standard zip or more secure AES encryption.

Although the official archiver for the open, high-compression "7z" format, the program also supports the creation of multiple formats including ZIP, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR and WIM. It will extract a long list of other formats, among them RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, RPM, VHD, VMDK etc. Even more formats are supported through third-party plugins. Supports many world languages.

Additionally, to use alternative toolbar and file icons, 7-Zip Theme Manager is available.

7-Zip Portable is a wrapper from PortableApps.com, auto-detecting 32 or 64-bit automatically. Alternatively, X-7zip is also available.

There is also a 7-Zip standalone console version.

Revo Uninstaller Free helps you remove any unwanted application installed on your computer. Additional clean-up tools include an auto-start manager, Windows tools manager, junk files cleaner, browsers history cleaner, office history cleaner, Windows history cleaner, unrecoverable delete tool and evidence remover.

fre:ac (pronounced "freak") is a feature-rich audio tool set featuring audio encoding and conversion, CD ripper, playlist and metadata editor. The program supports most popular audio formats such as MP3, M4A, WMA, OGG and FLAC, as well as support for a long list of additional converters such as Quicktime and Shorten. For CDs, the program supports reliable conversion (CD Paranoia), online databases (CDDB/GNUdb) and CDText, automatically writing song information metadata. The program is optimized for multi-core systems, making conversions as fast as possible.

Cross-platform (Mac, Linux, FreeBSD). Available in many world languages. Alternatively, fre:ac Portable automatically adjusts paths.

NexusFont Viewer is a font viewer and manager. You can view all installed fonts, check font details, activate/deactivate fonts, export a font as bitmap, and more.

PhotoDemon is a fast, feature-rich photo editor with rotate, resize, crop, etc. and a variety of color, contrast, filters and other graphics tools. The program also allows adding text, a metadata viewer/editor, on-canvas paint tool, layers, screenshot too, and works with common graphics formats including BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PSD, JP2, JXR, PPM, TGA and WEBP.

The program also supports macro edition and batch processing.

Music Collection allows you to build a database of your audio files across drives, disks and elsewhere. The program can accept any music, recorded books, or other audio media that you own or intend to. Add, edit and search for any information in the database. Album info can be manually entered or pulled automatically from one of 3 Internet album search tools. After saving the albums, you can browse or filter by a variety of criteria. Includes a variety of views and print methods.

Utilizes the Microsoft Access Database (MDB) format.

mp3DirectCut is a small tool for editing MPEG audio directly. You can remove parts, change the volume, split files or copy regions to new files, all without the need to decompress your MP3 into PCM/WAV. This saves work, encoding time and disk space. In addition, there is no quality loss to edited files.

DocFetcher indexes your computer, making the contents of a wide variety of files instantly searchable. Selecting a search result shows a preview of the file with text highlighted and without formatting. You can filter results by location, file type, minimum and/or maximum filesize and more. The program can index Microsoft Office, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, PDF, RTF, EPUB, HTML and more formats from drives, external volumes, archive files and Outlook .PST files (some .OST files also work).

The program supports complex searches via wildcards, proximity, ranges, "fuzzy" terms, and more using Lucene search. You can also do standard file name search via "filename:searchterm." The program is cross-platform and functional on OS X and Linux, as well as 64-bit Windows.

Note:

• The program requires that you manually add folders/drives that you want to view before searching. See the "Basic Usage" section of the homepage for a few intro steps. When adding to the search scope, make sure to check "Store relative paths if possible"
• Some issues have appeared with the program on Windows 10. Users may wish to test the PortableApps beta version if you have issues.

Zback is a backup and synchronization tool with a small footprint. Copy modes include update files, refresh existing files, or mirror source to target and can be run manually, from batch/script, or from the command line. Users can filter files based on extension, size, date, subdirectories and preview their backup/sync before running.

Screamer Radio is a player for streaming Internet radio that features 1,000s of stations, search by keyword, and favorites. The program has sleep timer and other auto-shut off settings to avoid wasting bandwidth. It supports Shoutcast and Icecast MP3, Icecast OGG Vorbis, WMA, AAC and AAC+ streaming.

Note that an earlier version of the program (v0.44) supports recording, does not require dotNET and is stealth.

Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch is a program for modifying audio, although its most noted feature is stretching. The program includes the capability for (8x, 50x etc.) sound stretching, as well "spectral smoothing" the sounds to escape the audio artifacts common in other audio editors when dramatically slowing audio. Includes many post-processing effects including filters, pitch/frequency shifters and more. The program imports WAV, OGG and MP3 files and can export to WAV or OGG.

The program can be used as an audio toy or in creating ambient or "screw"-style music.

System Explorer is a tool for accessing a variety of system internals. It can also be used as a Task Manager replacement with detailed information about processes, startup entries, explorer/IE add-ons, uninstallers, services, drivers, connections, opened files etc. It has a registry/file snapshot feature so that changes to the system can be computed and displayed in tree view or text list format. It also has a processes security tool that checks your processes against an online database.

Alternatively, System Explorer Portable is available.

Version note: This program has not been updated since 2016 and may contain security vulnerabilities. Please see this entry for the latest version of Opera.

Opera (Presto) is a discontinued version of the Opera web browser, meaning feature development and maintenance for this version of Opera has ceased. Compared to the newer version based on Google Chrome, it features a leaner memory footprint, more user-interface customization, an RSS reader, integrated e-mail client, IRC chat, and native BitTorrent support. A variety of extensions are available to further extend functionality.

Alternative Portable versions:

• Opera, Portable Edition (Legacy 12.x) (PortableApps.com Format, portablizes paths/registry, portable Java support)
• Opera@USB - (Opera in a ZIP file and a few custom tweaks.)

i2pdf (image to pdf) is a fast and compact application built to create PDF documents from a collection of images, typically scanned from a paper source or in form of digital photographs. i2pdf allows control over the final quality and size of the images stored inside the PDF. Supports JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF and TIFF file formats.

Note multi page / multi-frame formats are not supported (for example, multi-page TIFFs or animated GIFs). Additionally, transparency data is not preserved whether a PNG or GIF file.

NOTE: The i2pdf homepage is gone -- linking to Archive.org and Softpedia.

Bytessence DuplicateFinder (BDF) detects all the cloned files that you might have on your computer. These files, in addition to taking up valuable space, can increase antivirus scan time, slow defragmentation and searches, and make it more difficult to organize your files.

The program employs optimized detection system and file filters to reduce scanning time. Detected files can be removed in no time with the help of the automatic file selector and the predefined set of actions (copying, moving or recycling).

Note: Website is offline, switched to Archive.org

PhotoFiltre is a complete image editing/retouching program. It allows you to perform both simple and advanced adjustments to an image, as well as apply a vast range of effects and filters. Several extra plugins, selections, masks and patterns are available to download from the application website, to extend software features.

Languages: 26 including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and French. Website also available in French.

Alternatively, PhotoFiltre Portable is also available.

Blumind is a lightweight and powerful mind mapping tool. It features multiple document editing, multiple export formats, and layouts from org charts, tree, and logic views.

Note: site offline, linking to archive.org

Daphne is a task manager replacement with a variety of extra features. It displays a list of currently running process with detailed information about: CPU usage, Process ID, Process name, Full path (and arguments), Priority, Class (Process / Service), Current memory usage, Peek memory usage, Current swap usage, Peek swap usage and Number of threads.

Additionally, the program has a crosshair that can be dragged onto existing windows to Find, Kill, put on top, change transparrency, and even enable/disable. A "trap" feature lets you modify or prioritize processes whenever they appear.

Alternatively, Daphne Portable is also available

SE-TrayMenu provides quick access to most frequently used applications and system commands via a customizable popup menu. Add frequently used elements to your system tray including applications, installed programs, and links using drag and drop. Completely customizable view with lots of pre-defined layouts and color schemes, as well as global hotkeys.

Note: program development stopped.

Moo0 File Monitor monitors a host computer activity including processor history, disk activity, and a customizable view of file activities (create, write, rename, delete) on one or more drives. File activity is displayed live to demonstrate what applications are modifying the drive. The program can be used to track down programs that are slowing system performance by reading/writing too much from the hard drive or for config files and other changes.

HTML log file export available.

Note: Program exits by right-clicking system tray icon (thanks Jimmy).

Tags 2 Folders sorts audio files into folders based on their metadata (tags). For example a given file could be moved to an folder set to the artist name followed by another folder set to the album name. Files can be moved or merely copied.

This function works with tags native to AAC, APE, FLAC, MP1 through MP4, MPC, M4A, M4B, OGG, OFR, OFS, TTA, WMA, and WV.

SE-Explorer is a simple and powerful dual panel file manager with tabbed interface and a wide variety of built in file viewers including audio, video, pictures, archives, documents, text with syntax highlighting, and even file hex view. The program can even view system files such as fonts and executable files, as well as icon libraries and DLL files.

The program also includes disk search and size analysis tools, and can compare text files, folders and subfolders.

Supported viewer formats include MP3, WAV, AVI, MPEG, WMV, SWF, FLV, ZIP, RAR, ISO, 7Z, MSI, CAB, PDF, DjVu, DOC and WRI, HTML, CHM, RTF, EXE and more.

NOTE: product development stopped.

Regshot is a small registry compare utility that allows you to take a snapshot of your registry make changes to your system (such as installing a program) and then taking a second snapshot to compare. The comparison report can be produced in text or HTML format and contains a list of all modifications that have taken place between the first and second snapshot. In addition, you can also specify folders (with subfolders) to be scanned for changes as well.

Alternatively, RegShot Portable automatically switches between 32 and 64-bit and adjusts paths.

Avira Setup Creator creates a customized installer of Avira Free Antivirus. The customized installer includes latest virus definitions and supports unattended installation. Written in AutoIt.

InfraRecorder is a burning app that facilitates the creation of data, audio and mixed-mode disks. It also supports erasing rewritable discs using one of four different methods, and copying an existing CD or DVD to another physical disc or disc image.

Supports HD DVD and Blu Ray data and video, as well as to or from a wide range of image file formats (BIN, DVD, IMG, ISO, NRG, etc.) and burns audio CD's from any file type supported via DirectShow / ACM - including FLAC, MP3, MP4, OGG, WMA, and more.

PortableApps version also available.

PixBuilder Studio is a free image editing software program for digital photo editing, images processing, and resizing. For digital photo editing, you can use its many professional quality functions. For example, it supports layers and Photoshop's .8bf filter format.

Note that the development of this software seems to have ceased.

Real Temp is a monitoring program designed to see the temperature of all Intel "Core" processors including Core 1, 2, i3, i5, and i7 processors. Each core has a digital thermal sensor (DTS) that reports data relative to the safe maximum operating temperature, known as "TjMax". As your CPU heats up, your "Distance to TjMax" will decrease.

As these processors will start to throttle or slow down as they approach their maximum temperature, it's possible to have a computer that slows down dramatically. To increase speed and reliability, a good TjMax distance is ideal.

The program also supports full logging, temperature alarms and shutdown, and the ability to calibrate for each core of your CPU.

Svift is a lightweight application launcher. Type a few letters to find applications on your Start menu or access online services such as search and email.

Square Privacy Cleaner is a fast, powerful, and easy to use privacy protection tool, able to remove all the unwanted history data on your computer.

NOTE: Program has gone commercial but the last available freeware version is still linked.

Drag two files, or folders, and swap their names.

Universal Extractor allows you to extract files from a wide variety of archive files, including ZIP, ARJ, LZH, as well as MSI and EXE files created using various installer packages (such as Nullsoft, Wise, Inno Setup, etc). Useful for testing apps for portability because you can extract files directly from installer packages without having to go through the installation process. Note that the original developer no longer updates the program so some manual updates may be required.

Alternatively, an unofficial version with the latest-and-greatest internals is available (on Lupo's PenSuite site).

Commercial use note: license restrictions are present on included files UHARC02.EXE and UHARC04.EXE, but can be deleted without dramatic impact on the software. See website for more information.

Advanced Strategic Command is a free, turn based strategy game. It is designed in the tradition of the Battle Isle series from Bluebyte and is currently available for Windows and Linux. ASC can be played both against the AI and against other human players, using hotseat or PlayByMail.