I don't have admin rights to my pc, but would like to use Mercurial (a different SCM is fine, too) to track changes. I have Mercurial installed, but can't install TortoiseHg because I don't have admin rights. Is there an alternative that doesn't require (either directly or through dependencies) admin rights?
P.S. I'm looking for a stand-alone application (i.e. a plug-in for an IDE like Eclipse isn't what I have in mind).
The only reason that you might need admin rights for something like Tortoise* is that it hooks into your Explorer to give you pretty icon overlays to click on.
If you're looking for a standalone command-line application, the normal distribution of just about any VCS will fill that need. Installer applications are generally optional for this sort of software.
I really find that I never use a GUI for working with Mercurial even when I have a decent one available (i.e. TortoiseHg) -- the command line interface is very nice, and you can enable the graphlog extension to see an ascii-art diagram of the repository right in the terminal.