Create a Thumbdrive Loaded with Portable Apps in One Easy Step

Wed Nov 29, 2006 6:39PM EST

See Comments (3)

I just opened a drawer in my office to find, literally, a dozen USB thumbdrives just collecting dust. Thanks to encouragement from Yahoo! Techie Alexander Yoon, I'm turning one of those drives into a portable application carrier, so I can stick the drive in my bag and have access to a full suite of productivity (and fun) apps anywhere I go.

In the old days, this meant cobbling together a bunch of downloads from mobile application web sites and putting together a custom collection on your USB drive. But thanks to PortableApps.com, the hard work has all been done for you.

PortableApps.com offers a nice selection of apps collected into a single 90MB download. Just download the EXE file and run it. It installs seven applications (including OpenOffice, Firefox, the Thunderbird email client, and an antivirus application) and runs "comfortably" from a 512MB thumbdrive. Other versions consume even less space.

Once installed, PortableApps launches a custom menu program when you insert the drive into a PC. This simple program lets you choose what program you'd like to run, and you can easily add more programs to the list by downloading whatever else you need. I highly recommend adding the 7-Zip archiver, VLC Media Player, and possibly GIMP (for photo editing) and Audacity (for audio editing) if you need them.

Altogether the system works great, and of course, it's completely free. Give it a spin!

Comments on Create a Thumbdrive Loaded with Portable Apps in One Easy Step

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  • 1 Posted by dmg122884 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:45PM EDT Report Abuse

    This is a well thought out group of programs. WinPenPack is also a promising option as a preconfigured portable program suite. However, both of these have their drawbacks. Portable Apps is limited to opensource software which lets out quite a few nice programs, and WinPenPack is, as of now, only available in Italian.

  • 2 Posted by hazifazlan on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:17PM EDT Report Abuse

    This application is great, It comes in handy especially when I'm not working on my computer. This is another reason for not buying the laptop. I'm just wondering, is the security features of the potable apps good enough to protect my thumbdrive,I mean the antivirus?

  • 3 Posted by aoimoku on Thu Sep 3, 2009 2:56PM EDT Report Abuse

    I use the abiword and firefox browser portables, and they are fine. They are great for doing some college work on the go. These are my preferred ones, so settings and bookmarks come with me on the usb. Firefox, on a 2.0 usb port, runs just like it would on average computer. The antivirus, ClamWin Portable, has limited ability, such as disabled scheduled scans and updates, as well as being a free version (it doesn't do realtime scans, that is done manaully by user). So, look around for other antivirus portable apps, they can be found on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_apps.

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