I had recently purchased a Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB from newegg.com. A friend of mine was recently transferred back from the US, so I took advantage of Black Friday.
I had knew about portable apps for a long time now, but didn’t really go into it much. I didn’t have a USB thumb drive before, so I used it in conjuction with Dropbox. Since Dropbox has a 2GB limit, I didn’t really put much apps into it. Now that I have an 8GB drive, and I barely know what to make use it for, I decided to move my Portable Apps into it.
There are other portable suites out there, like Pen Drive Apps or the looks-proprietary U3. But I guess I’m most familiar with Portable Apps. I’ve been thinking about putting a whole OS into it, but then I will have to boot from it each time to use. Ubuntu Portable sounds cool in theory but not very useful. Since my home and work OS are both Windows (Vista 64 and XP respectively), Portable Apps works just fine.
These are the official portable apps stuff I’ve got in:
- 7-Zip Portable
- DosBox Portable
- FileZilla Portable
- Firefox 3 Portable
- Notepad++ Portable
- PuTTy Portable
- VLC Media Player Portable
PuTTy and FileZilla portables are lifesavers! One aspect I liked is I am able to add my own stuff in, like:
- utorrent
- Genesis Emulator (gens)
- NES Emulator (fceux)
- SNES Emulator (snes9x)
- Madness Interactive
I’ll probably add more soon.
I have also recently discovered PTC, which expands the capabilities of the Portable Apps menu, allowing you to rename apps on the menu, change the theme, always stay visible, add categories, etc. It’s a pretty cool hack that I heartily recommend to anyone who is as fond of customizations as me.
Now who’s crazy enough to set up World Of Warcraft as a portable app? (Of course, I don’t recommend doing it. For one thing, the amount of read/writes will probably kill the flash drive faster than usual. And I’m not sure how the USB transfer bottleneck will contribute to the online lag.)
Tags: portable apps, usb drive
