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"Browsing, Playing and Editing without installing"

If you have a work PC or Laptop or if you’re not sure of installing software directly to the PC, you may be interested in another option, using Portable Apps.

Portable Apps is a free suite of applications which have been put together by different companies to work using a single, simple menu system. It’s also small enough to fit on a 4GB USB Memory stick or even 2GB if you use the smaller version. The software will work from any portable platform including iPods, which is very useful if you want to carry your software around without too many extra gadgets.

My recommendation is to use an 8GB Pen Drive or, better still, a portable hard drive, as it will leave space for documents, pictures, music and movies.

Why use Portable Apps?
Many of the PCs you will use for work will have restrictions on what you can install and use. Portable Apps does not install any drivers, codecs or programs to your PC, everything it needs is installed directly to the Memory Stick or media of your choice.

It’s also very fast and the menu allows you to access all your applications simply, in the same way that the START menu works on Windows.

The software is all fully featured, despite being free, and is carefully selected to avoid anything ‘dodgy’ from being downloaded.

What’s Included?

You can pick and choose which applications are installed on Portable Apps and the software comes in a basic package or several larger packages with more software. The Basic package has the advantages of being able to install exactly the applications you want on top of the menu system, leaving space for other things on your media.

The basic package is 1MB, the next is 46MB and includes pretty much all of the essential software you need. Finally, there is a larger package weighing in at 124MB which includes OpenOffice. In addition to this there are tons of other programs from the site to install including MPlayer.

Software Rundown
Firefox Browser – This is a great little web browser which many people now prefer over Internet Explorer. It is fully supported by Flash and other add-ins which the modern Internet requires and seems to be a lot faster than IE. The Download tool is particularly nice for monitoring your Internet downloads.

Audacity – This is a Wav editor, a tool for editing sound files. It can pick up MP3 and other sound files, chop them up and add effects. The software will also let you save and convert to different formats.

Clamwin – A basic AntiVirus. It won’t replace your full Antivirus suite but it’s useful to have around with you to run quick scans. There are free updates to keep your virus definitions up to date.

CoolPlayer – A nice little music player, it’s quite basic in function but does include skins to change the look of the player.

Pidgin – An instant messaging tool similar to Yahoo Messenger or MSN which will let you mix all your contacts from various messaging services into one program.

GIMP – A now established photo and picture editor which has a lot of the functions of more expensive editing software like Photoshop. Slightly daunting at first for the basic user, GIMP has a whole load of editing tools and is very flexible.

OpenOffice – This has now been established as a real alternative to Microsoft Office and contains many of the functions you can find in the MS package but all for free! Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Image editing, presentations, they’re all here.

MPlayer – This cool little Application will play most of your video formats without having to worry about installing codecs to your PC. It plays videos without breaking into a sweat and has all the functions of Windows Media Player without the hassle.

Keypass – If you’re like me you have loads of passwords for different applications. Keypass can help securely keep track of them all for you. Much better than sticking all your passwords in a document and hoping no one else reads it!

Sumatra – A small PDF reader that does away with a lot of the menu options for those who just want to read PDF files without any editing. It’s quite basic but this means it’s also pretty fast to open and scroll through pages.

ThunderBird – Part of the Mozilla family (Firefox), Thunderbird is a nice email reader that does a similar job to Outlook, organising all your emails and allowing you to view them offline as well as sending, attachments and all the other options you’d expect. As with Firefox it works fast and has pretty much everything you need without the footprint or cost of larger programs.

Sunbird – A Calendar and Task handler which keeps track of your daily, monthly and weekly events. It can’t connect with Outlook but it does have compatibility with Apple’s ICal which may mean the Ipod Touch and IPhone could possible integrate with this in the future.

These are just a selection of the most used apps for Portable Apps, there are many others being written all the time and even basic Windows games like a version of Minesweeper are available. I’ve been using Portable Apps for the last year and it’s been a wonderful experience, preventing the need for installing anything to my work PC and keeping my data safe in one place at the same time.

Alternative Options
Most of the applications here are available as stand-alone versions which will need installing. The bonus is that they tend to have a few more options or will be more powerful, but most of the software here is fully featured anyway.

There are also other pieces of software that you can use individually such as AVS Video Editor, various picture viewers and music editing software, both free and paid for. The main reason I use Portable Apps instead of these is due to the integrated menu system and being able to trust the source, as well as receiving updates for the software.

I guess the opposite arguement is that Hard Discs have greater failure rates despite having a longer life cycle.

Though there is also the fact that a Hard Drive won't have an easily measurable finite life-cycle anyway.

Either way, back to the point: Portable Apps is briiliant (to use a phrase from the 80's!) whether you use it on a USB stick or mini portable hard drive, or even an iPod! :)

There are many factors in fairness, however is known that there is a finite number of times that Flash Memory can be written to, that's what puts some people off doing this. And generally you have no idea how many writes are being made to your device by your applications.

This is the reason I stick away with it, but also know people that swear by it like yourself. Unfortuantely its not for me.

There will be many factors as well, cheaply made USB sticks are not really going to perform as well as decent quality ones, I'm sure Freeola's are the latter though! The 100,000 write cycle is a figure from 1997, several articles have pointed to this being improved a lot.

The cost now is small enough to warrant using a USB stick anyway, then replacing it at a later date. Personally, I have a 120GB micro Hard Drive which is about the same size as a Motorola V3 phone.

Hmmm... wrote:
> So if it was causing problems (see motomoto's post) with Flash
> Storage I would have thought it would be common knowledge by now?
> So hopefully that's not correct...

Its common knowledge for me and some people I talk to ^__^

I didn't think it was a rumour, I thought it was fact. Hence it being a commonly discussed issue with SSD's, the replacement to Hard Discs.

I'm starting to doubt myself, but even if it were to be true, you would still get a fairly good amount of life out of the Memory Stick.

I know its wikipedia but, heres some info about Memory Wear:

Wikiwiki.

At the end of the day, if you didn't use a Memory Stick/SSD that much, then yes in theory it could last 50+ years.

I thought that the stories about Flash Memory being only used so many times was just internet rumor?

Surely solid state memory would be more robust than a physical spinning drive?

Edit: Is 51 years enough time? !

Or hopefully it is......

I would rather an entire technology be faulty and wrong then Motomoto lol

If it has been around for years, why is it not more popular?

PortableApps has been around for a few years now - see my post from 2006.

So if it was causing problems (see motomoto's post) with Flash Storage I would have thought it would be common knowledge by now? So hopefully that's not correct...
[s]Hmmm...[/s]

But Freeola don't sell portable hard drives....yet. :)

Does you opinion matter though? Mwaahaa.....the answer is obviously "yes, more than yours"

I didn't think of it like that though. But I like the idea of carrying around everything I ever need on my USB Stick :S