I absolutely abhor applications that infest your machine in the C:\Users\<blah>\AppData\<blahblah> folder, needlessly littering their “little pebbles of rabbit droppings” all over your hard drive (similar to Mac OS’s ._crap). I have administrator access and don’t want multiple copies of your program, thank you – much less mis-matched, outdated versions.

It’s hard enough to explain software interfaces to my elderly parents without having to also waste time explaining why their applications have different buttons due to different versions due to these “profile-local” installs, or why their C:\ boot drive, running on that small, purposely designated PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, was running out of disk space with multiple copies of the same files…

Spotify and Zoom are prime examples, particularly Spotify – at least Zoom provides an offline MSI installer (which then properly installs into C:\Program Files (x86)\)…

But… although there’s a desktop x64/64-bit installer (which infests individual profile’s personal directories), there’s no x64/64-bit version of said MSI installer… But is there?

Well, I saw the desktop link and decided to “just try” the “extended bits” (?archType=x64) on the x86 MSI installer link…. and it worked! (well, at least at the time of writing this anyway)…

Enjoy!