Since it has been a several days without anything particularly interesting for me to complain about, I thought I would tell you about portable applications and share with you what I currently have on my thumb drive.

First of all, what is portable computing and why would I want to do it? Well, to be brief, portable computing means that you have your applications stored on a thumb drive, rather than on a hard drive. The truly portable application does not use the Windows registry at all and leaves no artifacts of its execution on the PC or its hard drive. The biggest benefit is that you can take your thumb drive to any PC and know that you will have those applications available. For example, if you go to an interenet cafe, or a library, you do not have to worry whether they have your favorite web browser installed (especially since they will probably not want you to install anything on their machines).

The best portable apps are small, fast and focused on a single kind of functionality. Yes, you can get a portable version of a full office suite (Open Office, iirc), but that seems to be less useful to me. I use these applications mostly for things that I want to have with me (like reference material or phone book info), for things that I want to use both at work and at home without having to maintain two sets of setup info, or for system information.

Now, the list. These are the apps that I currently have on my thumb drive (in alphabetical order):

• Autoruns lets you see what programs are configured to startup automatically when your system boots and you login. Autoruns also shows you the full list of Registry and file locations where applications can configure auto-start settings.
  NOTE: The company that makes both this and ProcessExplorer (see below) was recently bought by Microsoft, so get them while they are still free.
• ContactPocket is a nifty little contact management application (i.e. an address book).
• Convert is a cool and easy to use way to convert just about any value to anything else. Very useful.
• CubicExplorer is a replacement for Windows Explorer/File Manager/whatever it is called this year. The niftiest thing about it is that it has a tabbed interface -- that is, you can have different folders visible in different tabs, switch between them easily, and even drag files from one folder to the tab for another and it will drop the files in that other folder.
• CyberShredder does just what it says -- you drop files on it, and it makes sure they are gone.
• Foxit PDF Reader is a leaner, faster PDF file reader than the big Acrobat reader.
• GreatNews is a portable RSS feed reader.
• KeePass is a password keeper. It keeps information about your internet accounts (forum memberships, online shopping IDs, etc.) locked away, safely encrypted on your thumb drive and accessable by your master password. Open source, too.
• KeyNote is my favorite notetaking software, since you can organize your thoughts/notes into a structured tree of related notes, and then also have multiple trees in separate tabs. Try it, you will see what I mean.
  NOTE: This program is no longer supported by its creator. The source code is available, so if you want to pick it up and update it, you can.
• FirefoxPortable -- What can I say? It is Firefox, and it is portable.
• ProcessExplorer is a very capable tool for finding details about the processes executing on your system.
  NOTE: The company that makes both this and AutoRuns (see above) was recently bought by Microsoft, so get them while they are still free.
• operaUSB -- I am trying this web browser out, to see if it is worth replacing my old friend Firefox.
• Quintessential Media Player is a manually thumbdrive enabled version of a still-in-beta update to a great media player. Don't try this at home.

Of course, I wouldn't have some of these if it weren't for the following sites:

The Portable Freeware Collection
kikizas.net
Wikipedia's List of portable applications
PortableApps.com
freshmeat.net

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