Have you heard about portable apps (applications)? About a year ago a co-worker told me about them. Applications that you can run on a USB stick “independent” of the computer. By independent I mean the applications are not installed on your computer at all, they are run right from the USB stick.
Great, so what. Why would I want that? Well there are several reasons. Maybe you jump from computer to computer alot and having your applications on a thumb drive would be nice so that you don’t have to install many applications on many different computers.
This reason is practical for me. I have FireFox Portable on my thumb drive. I use it while I am at work. In theory since it is a portable application it does not leave anything behind on my works laptop. Be careful here though. You work can still easily monitor your internet traffic if they want to, you just aren’t installing anything on your work computer.
Also, if I go out of town and just plan on using my Mom’s computer when I visit her then I will still have all my bookmarks and other infromation stored in the browser and ready for my use when I plug my USB stick into her computer. Once again doing nothing to her computer.
There are a ton of applications out there now days for your thumb drive. If you are really worried about secrecy and not wanting to leave anything on the computer that you are using then beware. There are alot of apps that claim to be portable apps, but when you go to use them they may leave a little config file or something on the computer that you are using at that moment.
Portable Apps.com is a pretty reputable place to get portable apps. They have there own menu that will list all portable apps on your thumb drive and easily launch them.
I just downloaded a game over there called Poker TH Portable. I have only played it once for about 3 minutes but it seems to have a real nice interface and feel to it. Whoever created it did a great job.
Some of my portable apps I have got from various locations all around the interent.
Some of my portable apps include – FireFox 2 Portable, Open Office Portable (like Microsoft Office), FileZilla Portable (FTP), GIMP Portable (Graphic editing) and more. I have DVD and CD burning programs and even Window’s Movie Maker portable.
These portable apps will run on your computer the same as they will on the USB stick, but why do that? You might as well install the full version.
AND you can’t install just any application as a portable app. Portable apps are designed to get the job done without hopefully touching your computer at all.
I will be reviewing portable apps in the future, so stay tuned.
[...] Well a couple of weeks ago I decided to start playing with some Linux distro’s. This just happen to be on accident. I read somewhere about small portable OS’s that you can run off a Live CD or you can even make a bootable USB drive. I decided to Google “Portable OS”. This is also an expansion for my love of portable apps. [...]