The majority of applications offer custom installation locations which means that users can install them where ever they want to. While that’s the way to give everyone maximum flexibility to install the software where they want, it is held back by the fact that some programs do not offer custom installation locations. The Google Chrome browser for instance will always install into the application directory of the user profile folder. Another example is the Steam software. Steam itself can be installed in every location. The games that are installed on Steam however will all be installed on the same drive, with no exception possible (workarounds are available).

When you look at how software is installed on Windows, you will come to the conclusion that the end result is not streamlined. This may not be a problem for the majority of users, who click on a link in the start menu or a shortcut on the desktop to launch the software that they have just installed.

Some users, myself included, prefer a organized folder system. I prefer it because it keeps the folder count low on a hard drive’s partition, and all applications accessible under one root folder. Microsoft’s idea was to make Program Files that folder, but the idea more or less fell short because of reasons outlined above.

Portable applications need to be addressed as well. They are not installed but simply copied to a location on the hard drive and executed from there. It is actually a lot easier to keep all portable apps under one root folder than programs that need to be installed.

One of the things that I do to keep a tap on my software installations is to use symbolic links to move them to a new destination after installation. A program like Steam Mover or Move and Link to do that without the command line.

My main question for all of you is this. How do you install software on your system? How do you use portable applications?

N2ncopy is a tiny Windows computer software program that allows to copy or move multiple files from different locations to different targets. The application will display a tiny overlay window that can be moved around freely on the screen. The window is divided into a green and blue area. Files that should be moved or copied can be dragged into the green area while the blue area is reserved for the target directories.

A right-click on the tiny interface will open the main interface displaying all the files and targets that have been dragged and dropped into the application up to this point. It is possible to remove some or all of the files and targets again and to specify of the task should by copying or moving files.

The only other options are to define rules if files with identical names are encountered in the target directories. Choices are to either overwrite those files or to rename the new files automatically.

A click on the Do the task button will start the file copying process while a click on Return will display the small overlay window again that can be used to add additional files and targets to the program. The program uses less than 3 Megabytes of computer memory while running.

A window displaying the file copying progress will be shown during the file transfers as well as a status report at the end of the process indicating if it was completed successfully.

Rich Copy is a file transfer software that has been in internal use by Microsoft for quite some time. The developers have now made it available for public use. The file transfer software program adds many new features to Windows Explorer file transfers including parallel transfers (also called multithreaded transfers), pausing and resuming the file copying process and a plethora of additional options.

The main difference between Rich Copy and third party tools like TeraCopy is the missing Windows Explorer integration of Rich Copy. It is an external file transfer program with an unbelievable set of options. To name a few of the advanced options that are available:

• Set thread count and cache size for transfers as well as process priorities
• Set or remove file attributes automatically
• Selecting specific errors to immediately stop the copying process
• Include or exclude specific files from being copied specifying file names, file attributes and / or dates.
• Running commands before and after the file transfer
• Extensive file operating logging
• Different file transfer modes and additional copying restrictions based on security, size or time stamps

Rich Copy has been primarily been designed to speed up but also give more control to file transfers in the Windows operating system. Users who simply want to speed up the original Windows Explorer copying process are better of using file transfer software like Teracopy or Fast Copy which integrates itself nicely into Windows Explorer and replaces the original file transfer dialog.

A major difference between the two applications is the fact that Fast Copy does not hijack the original Windows copy, delete and move operations but comes only into play when the user selects the application to handle the transfers. This can be done by loading Fast Copy or adding Fast Copy entries to the right-click context menu. The option for the latter is provided in the program’s options.

Since the usage is not automatic using Fast Copy makes only sense in situations where the user has to copy many files and folders at once, for example when moving the contents of one hard drive to another. It simply takes about five to ten seconds to start the file transfer because the source and destination locations have to be added to the program manually.

The context menu entry is only adding the source location to the program but the destination would still have to be selected manually. Fast Copy uses parallel processing if the source and destination location are on different hard drives and a huge buffer if they are on the same. It comes with a lot of options that can be changed like the buffer size or actions to take if a file exists in the destination.

The command line options might make it usable for batch files that use file operations. It lacks a few of the features that TeraCopy comes with like a queue that offers options to skip files or pause the process.

Fast Copy in its current version can be used in batch files because of its command line parameters and to copy large amount of files. It does not work as a real transfer replacement for Windows and have to leave that field to Teracopy.