Portable Applications – A Life Saver on a USB Stick

Like many of you out there I’m straight up addicted to using Notepad++. If I can’t use N++ I begin to have a productivity melt down. I have a ton of hot keys memorized, a bunch of formatters memorized, hell, it makes my life 10 times easier and I’m 10 times as productive with this tool. When its AWOL I feel, well, empty inside… Ok, not really… but you get the point. 🙂

There are times when  you’re out at a client, or working on a server and you just need access to certain tools that are not normally accessible on the machine that you’re working on. In consulting, this happens A LOT. Enter PortableApps.

Portable Apps allows you to put a lot of your common use applications onto a USB Stick so you can use them anywhere.

I have the following portable apps on my USB Stick:

• Notepad++– THE BEST TEXT EDITOR KNOWN TO MAN (another good one is Notepad2)
• Filezilla – Full Featured FTP Client
• FireFox – Safe/Secure Web Browser
• ThunderBird – Email Client
• PuTTY – lightweight telnet and SSH
• OpenOffice.org Apps (Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentations – all with Microsoft Compatibility)
• PDF Viewer – Portable PDF Viewer
• ClamWin – AntiVirus on the Go

You can choose from a list of apps on the site and build your own little custom set of programs. Here’s what I do:

1. Create a folder called UTILS on your USB Stick

2. Create a folder called PORTABLE inside of the UTILS directory

3. Drop all the Portable apps into that directory and now you have a TON of great apps at your fingertips.

Caution though… not all apps run on all operating systems. Most apps will run, but check them here: Application Compatibility Page.

Furthering its use, you can even download the Application Suite which contains most of the above items listed as well as some others. The application suite gives you a nice little start menu type of interface and it even places itself in the task bar until you tell it to close. Once you have that running you can also install other portable apps into your application suite by visiting the applications page, downloading the app you want, and then choosing install from the options on the Application Suite.

Here is a shot of my portable app suite running on Vista Business.