USING SAS 9.4 on a Portable USB stick

[Agent1592]

I have a licensed student version of SAS 9.4. However, sometimes I need to use another laptop on which I do not have administrator rights. Is it possible to create a portable version of SAS 9.4 that is small enough that I can use on a USB stick and is portable?

[ChrisNZ]

SAS was definitely not meant to be installed or used in this manner.

It makes many changes to the Registry, and probably other system changes as well,

I'd suggest that you copy the whole SAS tree and try it out; USB thumb drives are quite capacious these days.

You'll probably need to alter several settings, like point the work directory to c:\temp, and might even be able to make it work, but that would be lucky.

Keep us posted on your efforts if you will.

[Reeza · Accepted solution]

I sort of run SAS like this all the time. I use a 512GB SSD (thinking of moving to flash now) where I installed a VM and then open the VM on my different computers. However, your machine does need an application to run the VM, think VMware or Oracle VirtualBox. 

You do get a performance hit in terms of speed but it’s worth the convenience. Another option is installing on a cloud service. AWS supports it.