Universal Extractor: The Portable Application Seeker’s Best Friend
March 20th, 2007As a portable application addict, I have become rather resistant to installing applications. But then again, quite frequently, I want to try out new applications that typically seem to require installation. For example, applications that can be downloaded as Windows Installer (.msi) packages appear to need to be “installed”. However, quite often developers simply package their applications that way to make it easier for their users to install, yet the applications don’t really need to be installed and can run as portable applications. The Universal Extractor was designed as an easy, convenient way to extract files from installation packages. The Universal Extractor is itself available as an portable app (look for the UniExtract Binary Archive download link). Using this app you can extract the files of a .msi or .exe installation file, extract it to a folder and test if if works without installation. Note that this is not a hack to get larger, more complex applications to run as portable apps.
April 18th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Nice find. I’ll give this a try tonight. I recently purchased a USB drive (SanDisk Cruzer Micro) that fits on my key chain and use it to carry my life around, along with my essential apps. I use the Portable Apps Suite and have been very happy with it.
December 1st, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Eight months later someone submits an article on same topic to Digg and gets 500+ votes and makes it to the front page. These guys even copied the article from another site (TechnoBuzz) Crazy, huh?
http://www.digg.com/software/Open_up_almost_any_file_with_Universal_Extractor
December 2nd, 2007 at 2:44 pm