Sorry but I am a total Newbie to Home Assistant. I am an Insteon user and trying to use Home assistant to use and integrate my devices. I installed HA Windows Portable on my Windows 10 PC, created an account and logged in and was successful connecting to my old hub and a number of devices. I logged out and bookmarked the login page in my Firefox Browser yesterday. Today I when I clicked on the bookmark all i got was a page showing initializing and then an unable to connect error. I re ran the CMD prompt installation to get to the create an account screen and put in the same user name and password as I did yesterday but nothing was retained so I had to start over. Why was I not able to login from my bookmark and why wasn’t my account info not retained?
HA Windows Portable is completely unsupported so I suspect very few people here are using it and will therefore not be in good positions to help. Applying some tags might help identify the post to people and maybe reach out via the AlexxIT/HassWP: Portable version of Home Assistant for Windows (no need to install) (github.com)
If you are interested in HA then a really would suggest using a supported installation method otherwise you are likely to struggle at some point.
whichever way you go hope it works out for you
Thanks for the advice.
So what version or installation would you recommend that I could use and install on a Windows PC if any? when I view the choices under Windows it list download the appropriate image and has 4 choices which I am clueless where to go from there.
Hi, those 4 choices are linked to the kind of virtualization that you use on Windows.
If you never have used virtualization, it might make things more complicated.
Don’t you have an older pc/laptop that you don’t use anymore?
Unfortunately no.
Would it be wiser to buy a Raspberry Pi and work with that?
Raspberry Pi’s were hard to get, don’t know currently and prices have gone up because of that.
If you browse the forum, you will see quite some pro’s and con’s of using a RPi; there can be a problem with the SD card getting corrupt.
Using a high quality SD card is advised or even better, use a SSD.
I am currently testing a thin client; they can be found cheap when used.
check out a 2nd hand HP elitedesk 800 G2 or a lenovo m93p - they can be had on ebay for same price as a PI 4 - and you can get them 
Again, thank you for all your suggestions.
Another suggestion:
