WinRAR Portable

Just recently I found out that there is a perfectly legal way to get WinRAR Portable, install it on a flash drive and use it on any PC.

WinRAR Portable lets you use all the features of the popular archiver without having to install it on every computer. WinRAR Portable will be useful both for system administrators and regular users. Run the archiver on any computer without installation thanks to its support for storing settings in the winrar.ini file.

Starting from WinRAR version 5.20 users no longer need to search for dubious portable archiver builds from unknown developers and download them to their computer. WinRAR now officially supports installation to an external drive (e.g., USB flash drive) and may be used on any computer where this USB flash drive is plugged in.

You will be able to open and create .rar and other types of archives of unlimited size, and to do it very quickly—WinRAR Portable is able to make the best use of the CPU resources of the PC where the decompression or compression takes place. Its multi-threading feature makes it very fast on multi-core processors.

List of all supported formats: RAR, ZIP, 7Z, ISO, JAR, ARJ, CAB, LZH, TAR, GZ, TAR.GZ, BZ2, TAR.BZ2, ACE, UUE, Z.

Winrar portable has a command line mode. You can also save frequently used compression settings to a file for quick access.

Pros

• does not require installation on every new PC;
• leaves no traces on the PC where the archives were processed;
• does not change the Windows registry;
• can run on PCs that do not allow third-party software (including archivers) to be installed.

Cons

• unlike the standard version (or, to be more precise, unlike the standard installation method), WinRAR Portable does not integrate into Windows Explorer (this can be done only on the PC where the archiver was installed to a flash drive, but if you disconnect the flash drive you may experience problems with the context menu, so I do not recommend doing that). If you want WinRAR to integrate into your operating system, do a normal installation on your PC (not on an external drive).