where is the best place to store portable apps in Windows 7

Question

I have a number of small portable apps and utilities. Where does Microsoft recommend we keep these?

Lots of installed apps install themselves into \users{username}\appdata\local but it doesn't make much sense for me to put stuff there myself. \program files\ doesn't seem right either because non admin users don't have write access there.

Is it recommended to create a \users{username}\applications directory?

Answer 1

I'm the only regular user of my Win 7 PC, and I put stuff like that in D:\bin (reflecting my Unix background), similar to what John T suggests. Since I'm the only user, I don't bother with giving others read/write access. However, on a multi-user machine, I would go with John T's suggestion for programs to be available for other users, and your suggestion of \users\{username}\applications for programs to be used only by the user.

Answer 2

Microsoft doesn't really have a specification of where portable applications should be installed.

For shared applications and documents, I have a folder off the root of the drive called shared (C:\shared) with an ACL allowing the everyone builtin Read/Write access.

You may wish to create a custom local group in computer management and only give this group full access to the shared folder. You can then add users at your discretion. Keep in mind that if one user infects one of the executables with a virus, nothing stops everyone else from running them.