К сожалению, MiKTeX нынче жутко глюковат. А TeXLive можно и портабельным образом пользовать:

4.2 Portable (USB) installations
The -portable installer option (or V command in the text installer or corresponding GUI option) creates a completely self-contained TeX Live installation under a common root and forgoes system integration. You can create such an installation directly on a USB stick, or copy it to a USB stick afterwards.

Technically, the portable installation is made self-contained by setting the default values of TEXMFHOME, TEXMFVAR, and TEXMFCONFIG to be the same as TEXMFLOCAL, TEXMFSYSVAR, and TEXMFSYSCONFIG respectively; thus, per-user configuration and caches will not be created.

To run TeX using this portable installation, you need to add the appropriate binary directory to the search path during your terminal session, as usual.

On Windows, you can double-click tl-tray-menu at the root of the installation and create a temporary ‘tray menu’ offering a choice of a few common tasks, as shown in this screenshot...

Источник: https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#t...