Portability

If you’re like me, and you have a whopper of a USB flash drive (they’re sold anywhere from 128MB to 5GB large), then you may be wondering what you can do with all that room. The latest big thing is portable computing — you might say it all started with John Haller’s Portable Firefox.

A quick rundown of portability. For those who don’t know how it works, here’s the basic idea: You take a program that you like to use, and, if it’s portable, you simply copy it to a USB drive (or any other folder) — it’ll save its settings in the folder, and hopefully won’t mess with the Registry, so you can carry around your settings. The programs John Haller has made mostly use custom-built NSIS launchers, and there are quite a few sites devoted to portability.

Portable Software — Where to Get It:

• http://www.PortableApps.com — the home of John Haller’s Portable Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, and more.
• http://standalone.atspace.org — over 300 portable applications. This is a friend’s site, and I’m helping him (though I’ve been delayed — see my post on the matter).
• http://www.PortableFreeware.com — a site that my friend, and many many others, submit portable programs too. This is my personal favorite.
• http://theinfobox.com/index.php/Portable_USB_Apps — a page with a big (for 512MB drives) downloadable USB App Suite, along with links to the homepages of these sites. This is my second-favorite.
• http://meprisant2.blogspot.com/2006/01/portable-usb-sofftware-melange.html – a blog entry with a list of portable programs.
• http://no-install.com — A forum/directory of portable stuff.

Portable Operating Environments

• http://www.u3.com — U3 is a system that runs portable applications, but only from U3 drives — sort of like Iomega’s ActiveDisk technology.
• http://www.ceedo.com — Ceedo is something similar, that runs $30 USD, and can be run from any flash drive.