General Discussions

What are the benefits of using Aurora with installer...or not?

Installer optionally creates desktop and startmenu shortcuts for you. If you uninstall it asks you if you want to delete the Aurora folder in appdata as well. That's it. Everything which you can do yourself with portable as well.

Some people prefer portable, some prefer installers. Now we have both 🚀

Basically just user preference just like with other apps that have a portable or installer version. Some people prefer portable as they can just extract Aurora onto a thumb drive and take it wherever. Some people prefer installer as it is more what they are accustomed to where it runs through a full app installation, adds shortcuts to Windows and Desktop, etc. We have had many people that don't understand what a "portable" version means and so they just try and run Aurora.exe from INSIDE the Aurora.zip file which results in failure. They don't realize that they need to fully extract the Aurora.zip before using Aurora. Either way you end up with the same software version.

Thank you both for answering, was wondering if by installing to Windows the program could have some useful integration side effects as for Windows Security for example.

I think you refer to Windows Defender? It doesn't care if the app is installed or portable, so no. And there are actually no other benefits than the few I mentioned above. Except of that you have a very small installer file that always downloads the latest Aurora for you. This can be useful for some very edge case scenarios like building your own Windows ISO file with programs getting pre-installed.

Great! Thank you! I'll gladly keep the original portable version that works flawlessly since the beginning of Aurora 😎