Useful Portable Apps for Your USB Drive.

Not only are USB drives now commonplace, but with increasing frequency, applications no longer require installation and can run from those USB drives.

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I got the idea for this post from Cam who observed that KeePass (mentioned previously) was portable.  I thought I'd share some portable apps with you that have been really useful.

If you are new to the subject of portable apps, a good place to start learning about them is "portableapps.com", Wikipedia also has some lists of portable applications to get you started.  There are a number of reasons you might want to use portable apps including;

• You are borrowing someone else's computer and don't want to install software


• You are not allowed to install software at work


• You don't want software to clog up Windows' registry and slow down your computer


• There is a set of familiar tools you want to use when moving from computer to computer.


• Portable applications that can run from your USB drive, don't make changes to your computer's registry startup files or hard disk. (unless you ask them to)


• Portable apps won't set themselves up to load when you turn your computer on.


• Sharing your most useful applications is as easy as copying some files

I've placed these in order of utility.

Texter - A powerful text replacement utility; we've looked at Texter previously

KeePass - Useful for securely storing your passwords We've also looked at KeePass previously

Firefox Portable - Run the popular open source browser from your USB key

Notepad++ - Thanks to Darryl for recommending this powerful editor which supports regular expressions and syntax highlighting.

7-zip - A lightweight archiving and compression utility

Open Office - An open source office suite similar to MS Office, which maintains a high level of compatibility with popular office products.

VLC Media player - Is described as a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats; it can play almost anything.

RocketDock - This one is just for fun, but its portable, and makes your applications easily accessible.

Xampp - More for died in the wool geeks, it is a portable collection of Apache web server, the PHP scripting language and the MYSQL database.  All open source and freely available, this is the easiest way to run a web server with web applications and data from your USB key. (ever think of your USB key as a web server?)  Now you can run any PHP/Mysql web app from a computer without installing a thing. (some assembly required)

Note: Many of these applications come in non-portable versions, so pay attention to which version you get. (I recommend starting with Portable Applications).