mIRC is one of the greatest and most popular Windows IRC clients available. Everyone who has used it will agree that mIRC is an excellent tool to put you in touch with other tech-savy individuals throughout the many IRC communities.

The program is reliable and stable, widely adopted, and sports a huge library of third party scripts which can be installed to customize just about everything in the program. Some of the most notable and yet taken-for-granted features about mIRC are it’s advanced post-connection preferences, allowing you to specify macros for actions such as joining a specific series of chat channels, specifying a user name specific to each IRC server, automatically registering a nickname you want to have privileges to, etc, all done automatically after the connection has been established, and each macro being executed appropriately dependent on which IRC network you have connected to.

Those configuration options, while being your best friend, can also be your worse enemy. Unfortunately by default, mIRC stores all the configuration preferences within the Windows registry. In this visual guide, I will show you how to make mIRC portable and able to be easily moved from computer to computer. All of this, while retaining your preferences without the need for the Windows Registry database.

Why storing preferences in the registry is not preferred.

mIRC stores it’s preferences in the Windows Registry. This can mean a few things to those who are aware of this depending on their comprehension of the Windows Registry.

• Security:
  All options including your personal license key are stored in plain text in the registry. If you are using a public or shared computer of any kind, these preferences and personal information can easily be dumped from the registry with little to be done to prevent or stop that.
• Stability:
  Those who are familiar with the Windows Registry database know that the registry database by nature can and may become corrupted. If this happens, all of your mIRC settings may be lost.
• Symbiosis:
  If you want to use your mIRC application easily among multiple computers while keeping your changes in preferences synchronized, this is not an easy task, as you would need to automate the process of dumping the registry values, transferring them to the other computer, and reimporting them. The process would then need to be repeated after any changes were made.

Making mIRC Portable for Security and Facilitated Use

Wether your motive for wanting to make mIRC Portable-ready is simply for convenience, security, or just to learn how to do it, these steps will help you accomplish this task with ease.

Step 1: Download the latest version of mIRC from the author’s website.

Head over to mIRC.com and download the latest version of the installer.

Step 2: Customize the Installation

Launch the installer, pressing the “Next” button from the welcome screen, and accept the terms of use license. When you come to the page for the installation directory, select the installation directory to be the root of your hard drive. We want to install it in a directory called mIRC on the root of the hard drive, rather than the Program Files directory. Typically this should be “C:\mIRC\“.

Now you will be presented with the option of selecting which features of the program you would like to install. By default they should all be automatically selected. If so, leave all program features selected and proceed onward. If not, choose the “Full” installation option, and then proceed.

For the start menu and desktop shortcuts, make sure to uncheck them. Also, uncheck the option for “Automatic Updates“, as this will mess with our customized installation. The reason for not having the program shortcuts is it will be too tempting for you to launch the program without the appropriate portable parameters, thus making the program write all of your settings to the registry, and rendering your time following this guide completely worthless. If you already have or have previously had mIRC installed to the root directory, you may optionally select the option to backup files.

mIRC will display for your confirmation and approval the settings which you have selected before it processes the configured install. Verify everything is correct and then install.

After the program has been installed, you will see a screen as below. It is very important that you uncheck the “Run mIRC” tickbox, as this again could disrupt our entire purpose of getting mIRC to run in portable mode. You may now “Finish” and exit the installer.

Step 4: Post-Install Tweaks

Now we will be creating the mIRC Portable Loader, utilizing Microsoft Windows’s command line batch processing capabilities from a batch script. Open up Notepad.

• For Windows XP users, Go to the Start Menu > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad.
• For Windows Seven and Vista users, from your Start Menu’s search box, type “Notepad”, and select the Notepad application as highlighted in the below image, identified by a light blue flip-notebook icon.

Within Notepad, type “start mirc.exe -portable” omitting the quotation marks. You may copy the text from this code box.

After typing that in, go to the file menu, and select Save As…

On the drop-down selector for “Save as type:” choose “All Files (*.*)”

Browse to the folder we installed mIRC to (in this guide, C:\mIRC\ ), and locate and run the launch_portable.bat file.

mIRC will open up with a screen similar to this one. If you have previously run mIRC before on your computer, then your screen may display differently.

Configure your settings as desired. They will all be stored in a configuration file within the mIRC directory, and loaded every time you launch with this batch file. Now, all you need to do is when the program isn’t running, copy or move the C:\mIRC\ folder and it’s contents to the location of your choosing. This may be an networked location, a USB Drive, or any type of mountable storage space, virtual or physical.

• If you launch mIRC from a shortcut, or by opening the .exe directly, the proper parameters will not be passed to it, and it will use the Windows Registry rather than our customized portable file.
• If you are concerned about the ease of access of having to browse to the mIRC directory each time, you may always create a shortcut to the launch_portable.bat script, and place that shortcut in a location you deem easy to access or convenient.
• Please note that any saved configurations will be stored in the file, so it is imperative that you guard your files well. As I stated, storing this information in a file can be more secure than in the Windows Registry, however this is only the case if you have locked down the permissions of the folder containing mIRC, such as placing this file in an encrypted partition built with TrueCrypt.