The Create Portable Installation item in the Help menu makes it easy to create a portable copy of AceText on a removable disk, USB stick or flash memory card. You can run AceText off the removable device on any computer, without leaving any traces of AceText on that computer.
If the capacity of the device you want to install AceText onto is limited, you can choose not to install certain parts of AceText on the device. The only part that is not optional is the “main application” part, which is AceText itself. You can select if you want to copy over the help file and the spell check dictionaries.
Note that the Create Portable Installation command will not delete any files from the device. If you use the Install onto Removable Drive command a second time, and select fewer parts than the first time, AceText will not remove the deselected parts from the device.
AceText will show you the complete list of devices that Windows reports as removable devices. External hard disks often report themselves as being hard disks rather than being removable devices. If you want to install AceText in a portable manner on such a device, turn on the option to treat all drives as removable drives. AceText will then create a file RemovableDrive.sys on the destination drive. This file act as a token to tell AceText not to touch the host computer.
To proceed with the installation, click on the device you want to install onto, and click the Install button. The label showing the amount of disk space needed will indicate the parts being copied to the removable drive. Once the operation is complete, the Create Portable Installation screen will close automatically.
AceText will copy itself to a fixed AceText subfolder off the root on the device. If you like more complex folder structures, you can move the complete AceText folder into a different parent folder on the device.
If you have not yet installed AceText onto your hard disk, you can create a portable installation by running AceText’s installer. On the welcome screen, click the Portable Installation button. Follow the steps. This method works even if you do not have the necessary permissions to install software onto the computer you’re using.
If you run the installer on 32-bit Windows the portable install will be 32-bit. It will work on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. If you run the installer on 64-bit Windows, then the portable install will be 64-bit. It will only work on 64-bit Windows. You can pass the /32 command line parameter to the installer to force it to create a 32-bit installation on 64-bit Windows.