Working around Installing as Admin

[Pluto is a Planet]

No questions here, this is an informative post for people who run into the same problem as I did. There are prior questions addressing this, but they're either old or more specific to a user's question. Anyways, I was trying to install paint.net onto my work PC however the installer requires elevating administrative privileges, which my workplace does not let me have for security purposes. There are two suggestions to solve this...

 

• The first is to install paint.net on another PC (where you do have admin privileges) and copying the installation directory to the target PC (where you don't have admin privileges). There's also an easy way to let you preserve your settings if you want to when copying the directory over. This workaround has some prerequisites, which are that the right version of .NET needs to already be installed on the target PC (though this may change one day), you have to work with a filesystem, and you have to transfer files between two PCs. More information can be found here: https://blog.getpaint.net/2017/07/21/portable-mode-in-paint-net-4-0-17/
• The other suggestion is paying $7 on the Microsoft Store for lifetime access to the application there. This has some benefits, including automatic updates handled by Windows 10, it means that you support the developer (Rick), and installation is dead simple. My issue is that even my workstation prevented access to the Microsoft Store with the following "page could not be loaded" error: however this was easily fixed by disabling my work's VPN temporarily.

In the end, I went with the second option because I previously paid for the Store app when it first came out. While the Store page says it's only supported on Windows 10 Home and Pro, I am using Windows 10 Enterprise and it worked perfectly fine.