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Flash drives 2.0: How to carry your Internet browser with you

Matt Hewitt,
Grand Central Magazine

PortableApps is a free downloadable program that installs programs customized to fit on a flash drive and allows them to be launched directly from the drive without the need to install the programs on each computer you use. Photograph by stock photo
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With most computer users carrying information back and forth – whether it is from an office computer to home or a lab computer to a dorm room – a method of transporting data is a must. Fortunately, the days of floppy drives and zip disks are behind us.

Most people use flash drives as their data transfer method of choice. There are good reasons behind this. Flash drives are cheap, can hold remarkably large amounts of data and rarely get corrupted. Most are smaller than a thumb (hence ‘thumb drive’) and can easily be clipped to a keychain or lanyard so they are always with you. Flash drives also can be used on almost any computer without the need to install a program to access the data on it.

One thing many people do not know is that it is actually possible to install programs to a flash drive and have access to those programs no matter what computer you may be working on.

PortableApps is a free downloadable program that allows you to do just that. The application installs programs customized to fit on a flash drive and allows them to be launched directly from the drive without the need to install the programs on each computer you use.

The site has about 50 portable applications that can be installed to a flash drive rather easily.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Mozilla Firefox:

Most people have either used Firefox at one time or another or rely on it as their main browser. So why would you want to carry it around with you on a flash drive?

Well for one, not all computers have Firefox installed on them, although the browser is becoming more popular and mainstream. My favorite reason for carrying around Firefox on a flash drive is that once you set it up with your personal bookmarks and favorite extensions, they’re always with you no matter what computer you’re using.

OpenOffice:

OpenOffice is a free software suite comparable to Microsoft Office. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet creator, presentation creator, diagram creator, database creator, as well as a math equation builder.

OpenOffice is great for those times when you’re on a computer that doesn’t have Microsoft Office installed. The software suite isn’t compatible with the Office 2007 file formats currently, but will be updated in the next few months to add in that functionality.

The interface is very similar to Office 2003, so if you happen to find yourself on a computer with Office 2007 and are more comfortable with the old file menu style interface, OpenOffice may be worth looking at.

Sumatra PDF:

Most public computers these days have some type of PDF viewer available. But on occasion, you may find yourself at a computer that doesn’t have one. Whether it is at a public library or an office somewhere when you need to access an application, journal or government document saved in the PDF file format – you might as well come prepared and have Sumatra on your flash drive, just in case.

VLC Media Player Portable:

VLC Media Player can open almost any type of video file out there, which is helpful since most office computers don’t have Apple’s QuickTime player installed. VLC will run QuickTime files as well as a multitude of other video files without the need to download and install a bunch of encoding/decoding programs. VLC will also play DVDs.

Pidgin Portable:

Pidgin is an open source instant messaging application. (See my review of it here)

It is able to communicate with many different IM services, including AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and Gtalk.

Rather than installing each of these to a computer and have to organize four different buddy lists, just install Pidgin to a flash drive and organize it once. You’ll have all of your buddies in one program and be able to take your buddy list with you no matter what computer you are on.

GIMP Portable:

With a full version of Photoshop costing about $650, it’s no surprise that many businesses and public computer labs don’t spring for a license on every one of their machines.

Instead of finding yourself without photo editing software, put GIMP on your flash drive. GIMP is an open source Photoshop knockoff and by using PortableApps, can be used on any computer without installation to that computer.

The program definitely isn’t a full Photoshop replacement, but it has many of the same features and functionality and can open the Photoshop file format as well as a slew of other photo formats. And because the program is open source, it’s constantly being improved upon.

Visit www.portableapps.com for more information and a chance to download all of these applications.