How much space does a Program take up on my computer?

muskrat said:

I want to move some of my programs from my computer to a thumb drive.Is there an easy way to know how many Gbytes the program takes up before I transfer it? I tried right clicking the desktop icon, but that doesn't work.

If you are planning on putting them on a thumb drive to use in other random machines, I'm pretty certain the best way is with a portable version of the software because usually the drive letter will be different and that is where you get into problems unless you plan on changing drive letters each time as well, not to mention admin priv.

Also, truly portable software usually does not leave registry entries I don't think either, or removes them when you close program like how portable ccleaner works from what I have read. So to keep a real clean os you could even install portables on an internal drive and then decide you don't want the program anymore you can just delete the folder and it's completely gone(except for some things like skype may leave a settings folder in user data folder) but that is what I think truly portable means.

Something like world of warcraft or steam can be considered "portable" in that you just need to run the wow launcher or steam.exe again on the new os install without downloading 20 GB again heh, but it has to rebuild the initial install on the machine to work the first time. A portable app doesn't require that. At least this is how I understand portable Vs msi installer to mean.

Have you checked into something like portableapps.com? Nice little package that offers lots of portable versions of popular software you can carry around on usb with you and even checks for software updates when you open program. You don't even need to carry a usb stick with you, just use dropbox