PortableApps: Carry Your Favorite Computer Programs With You

7. February 2007, 22:05 UhrVikas Sah

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Now you have the ability to carry your favorite computer programs along with your bookmarks, settings, email and much more with you on a USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive etc. It can be used on any Windows (and many Linux) PCs.

PortableApps.com is an open platform that works with all the hardware mentioned above. It’s open source built around an open format format that any hardware vendor or software developer can use.

They provide a rich suite of applications in their PortableApps Suite^TM . The suite is spyware free and there are no advertisements. The suite can be downloaded from here.

I installed the standard version of their application suite (there is a Lite version also) on a USB drive and it occupied around 250 MB of space. The installation was also very easy as all you have to do is download the installer and run it. Point the install directory to the root of your USB drive or whatever other media you are using and that is it. After install a PortableApps icon sits in your tray bar, clicking on which opens the PortableApps menu. Here is a snapshot of the PortableApps menu with the standard suite installed: (click on the image to enlarge)

The advantage of using portable apps is that all the data which you enter in the program (email, appointments, documents, configurations, bookmarks etc.) are stored on the hardware media on which portable apps is installed. So, when you take your USB stick and plug it into another machine at your friends house or at work, you get all your data.

Some prominent applications that are supported are: