Has anyone considered installing PortabeApps Suite on their desktop?
It would be great. If you have multiple pcs you could set up your favorite apps in PAM and drag and drop from your usb drive to your c: drive. Put a shortcut to PAM in startup and have all your favorite apps ready to go. You could do this over several computers or have one easy app install when reinstalling Windows.
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Our office has already standardized on OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Thunderbird and lately we've had a lot of turnover and musical PCs which was just creating headaches for me setting up new WinXP profiles and moving the relevant info from the old profile to the new profile etc.
I installed the PortableApps Suite to their home drive on the network and put the shortcut in the startup. Works like a charm!
I had been meaning to post here about one minor glitch. I realize that the whole point of this project is to NOT leave behind personal data by writing to the registry, etc. But in this situation, when you click an email hyperlink, for example, Windows doesn't recognize that ThunderbirdPortable is the default email application and therefore doesn't open a new message window. I haven't looked into it deeply, but it seems that the default browser and email settings are a bit more than a simple "always open with" dialog (which works just fine with OpenOfficePortable.)
If there is a quick way to tell windows that TBPortable is the default email app, I'd appreciate it... even if it's a registry entry!
Dr. Hook
It seemed like a quick way to get a PC up and running quickly. Would it help if TBPortable was on the c: drive? It might be that the network isn't fully connected when Windows looks for default apps (if its done at startup) so it isn't found.
Why not just install PAM to the C: drive?
The main reason was for backup purposes. The file server is automatically backed up hourly. I was also shooting for generic workstations. If one blows up, put a new one in it's place.
One thing that I didn't mention is that I also mapped the PAM "Documents" folder to the Windows "My Documents" folder, so it is pretty seamless to the enduser.
Placing PAM on the c: drive would also work just fine and may be preferable if it then allows TBPortable to be recognized as the default email client.