Keep you installer, at least the last version

Preparing for condition without internet connection

3 min readNov 4, 2023

In this story how to download the installer and move it to installer folder — or archiving it — is given step by step. It is a best practice but not too necessary.

Python

Installing Python in Windows is pretty straightforward and you can find the information easily in the internet also as in previous story (Viridi, 2023). Common tutorial starts with downloading the installer, then continues with several screenshot of the installer while it is in operation with default installation setting options (Biswal, 2023). There is also web page without screenshots but with some videos embedded from YouTube (Yegulalp, 2023). Another page gives further information about the setting options (Gangwar, 2023). As an alternative, instead of visiting Python Releases for Windows page and download the installer, you can also visit the Microsoft Store, where apps in the store are approved by Microsoft and can be easily installed, but with the downside is that they may be one or two versions behind the official release (Pounder, 2023). Other way to install Python is using Anaconda Navigator, that must be installed first (Kosourova, 2022). If you are command-line interface person, it is advisable to try Chocolatey, a third-party package manager, since Windows does not have a built-in package manager like some other operating systems (Monge, 2023).

Information

Computer specifications, and version of Windows and Python used are as followed,

AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics, 3201 MHz, 8 Core(s), 16 logical Processor(s), 16GB RAM, 500 GB HDD;
Microsoft Windows 11 Home build 10.0.22621 — Sep. 20, 2022;
Python 3.12.0 — Oct. 2, 2023.

It is Windows 11 since 10.0.22000 or build 22000. And for Python latest stable, 3.12.0 is released about a month ago.

Download

Visit https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/ to download Python installer.

Choose Windows installer (64-bit) https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.12.0/python-3.12.0-amd64.exe

Find the file python-3.12.0-amd64.exe, by default in Downloads as shown.

Archive

Move the downloaded installer to Installer folder for further use. Actually, if you always have good internet connection, you do not need to archive an installer (Connor, 2019). But sometimes it is easier or more convenient to use offline installer than download it again and again, e.g. installing several computers. There are some advantages and disadvantages between online and offline installers (Mukhtar, 2022).

There are already other installers saved in the Installer folder, where only the last version is kept. If you have newer version, it is up to you to delete previous version or save both. But if you save more than one version of installer, it is advisable to create a folder with the name of the app. Previous figure works best if there is only one version exists for every app.