I realize that for some of you, this story isn’t exactly news. To be honest, even I’ve known about PortableApps for quite a while, but I’ve never put it to use until recently.
PortableApps is a series of applications which have been built and configured for the sole purpose of running from an external device such as a flash drive, memory card or external hard drive. This allows you to port not only your data from PC to PC, but your applications as well. You can keep your email client (Thunderbird), web browser (Firefox) and many other tools and applications on the USB key and run them on any computer with Windows and a USB port.
How is this useful you may ask? A recent example:
I have been doing some presentations at work last week we had a laptop whose Powerpoint application refused to open (read: Runtime error every time it started). Admittedly a reboot probably would have fixed the probem, but I couldn’t take that chance. I had to get another laptop, (wait for Windows to boot), and get it all set up. This wasted about 15 minutes of everyone’s time.
A perfect solution to this would have been to use the OpenOffice slideshow application Impress and run the entire thing from my USB drive where the presentation was stored. So over the past couple of days, I’ve been trying out my new setup (Firefox, KeePass and OpenOffice) in the office to see how it runs on various other computers. So far, so good.
Have a look at the PortableApps suite. There are tons of great applications for this technology, and I’ll probably cover some more examples in the coming weeks.
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