μTorrent is a popular open source bit-torrent client application. When you download μTorrent and run the downloaded file, the installation program starts. The default folder of installation is C:\Program Files\uTorrent. The setup also creates various shortcuts too on desktop and start menu. It appears that you cannot use it without installing first. But there is a trick that you can run the client application without installing it on your hard disk. This article describes the procedure of using μTorrent as a portable application :
- First of all install 7-Zip on your system because it is needed to extract the files from μTorrent setup package. You can download 7-Zip from https://www.7-zip.org/.
- Download μTorrent classic from https://www.utorrent.com/downloads/complete. The downloaded file would be named something like uTorrent.exe. I have downloaded it on the Windows Desktop.
- Right-click on uTorrent.exe and then select 7-Zip → Extract to uTorrent from the context-menu. This will create a folder uTorrent and inside it will be all the uTorrent files.
- Inside the uTorrent folder (created in above step), delete these files – installer.exe, GenericSetup.exe, GenericSetup.exe.config, GenericSetup.dll.
- Inside the uTorrent folder, rename carrier.exe to uTorrent.exe.
- In the same folder, create an empty file named settings.dat. To do this, just right-click inside the folder and select New → Text Document, then rename the newly created file to settings.dat.
- This is it. Now you can double-click on uTorrent.exe from inside the uTorrent folder to launch your favorite BitTorrent client for Windows. You can start adding torrent files by selecting the appropriate options from the menubar.
You can either keep using uTorrent from this folder, create a shortcut to uTorrent.exe on your desktop or you can copy this folder to your USB pendrive and run μTorrent from any computer as a portable application. You do not have to install it on any of your computers. However in the portable mode, it does not associate itself with torrent files which could be a problem for some users.