My Portable USB Programs
This post was sorta inspired from a couple recent questions I was asked by my good buddy Stevie-D. Well, I guess I should say the his questions made me get off my “fourth point of contact” and finally create the post that I have been meaning to do all along. A post about all the portable USB apps that I use on my own USB stick!
What does this do? Well, it allows me to carry a fully customized computing environment to any PC running M$ Windoze. Meaning, I can take my USB stick with me, slap it into an available USB port on the host PC, run all my apps, and have the same friendly and familiar desktop where ever I so choose.
With this post, I not only help my buddy Stevie-D but if I ever loose my USB drive, I can come back and use this post as a reference in an attempt to recreate what I once had. Granted, I would be out a USB drive but… Well, without further ado, here is an ever growing list of all the portable USB apps that have come to call my “512Meg Sandisk Cruzer Mini” home.
For me, these are the “must haves…”
- Web Browser: Portable Firefox
- IM Client: Trillian with help from Trillian Anywhere
- Desktop Replacement: bbLean
- Clipboard Manager: CLCL
- File Management: xplorer2
- SSH Client: PuTTY
- SCP Client: WinSCP
- Application Launcher: PStart
More on this jewel below.
The “Nice to have…” list
- Sticky Notes Replacement: ATnotes
- Password Keeper: KeePass
- Office Suite: Portable OpenOffice
- Graphic Viewer: IrfanView
- FTP Client: FileZilla
- Notepad Replacement: Notepad++
- POP3 Client: nPOP
- Port Monitor: TCPView
- Remote Desktop: TightVNC
- UNIX Tools: UNIX Tools
- Text Editor: WinVi
- Audio Player: XMPlay
- CD Ripper: CDex
- PDF Reader: Foxit PDF Reader
- Start up monitor: Startup Control Panel
All the apps listed above have their own installation procedure to get them installed on your portable media USB drive. However, most come packaged as a .zip file where all you would have to do is extract the contents to a directory of your choice (prefferably on your USB drive 😉 ) and you’re done! When that is not the case, follow the instructions detailed in the respective apps’ website or readme files. I can personally attest that all the apps I have listed here run perfectly fine from my USB drive.
You might also want to consider some of these apps. I don’t use them for one reason or another but you might think otherwise.
- PIMs/organizers: EssentialPIM, Sunbird
- Email: JBMail , Portable Thunderbird, EmailVoyager, PocoMail PE
- Web Authoring: NVU
- Chat/IM: MirandaIM
Here is a list of sites where you can get more software to run on your USB drive:
So when it comes to launching these portable apps, what do you do? Use, what I believe, is an essential tool for “happy USB portable app’ing called PStart. When launched, it can be configured to launch any app from a USB drive and even apps installed on your local PC. On my USB drive, I have all my apps in a root directory called “Portable Apps” with each installed app having its own sub-directory. PStart unifies all these sub-directories and creates a one stop launch pad instead of having to tediously navigate into each sub-directory just to launch an app. Anyway, once you use it, you wont go back!
Thats it for now, enjoy!
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- Published:
- 10.13.05 / 2am
- Category:
- how-to's, tech, tips-n-tricks
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