"Living" portable?

I use my usb drive as my personal apps system. The only applications stored on my pc at home are the intensive apps, such as pinnacle studio, microsoft office (for those friends that don't want to switch to openoffice), other graphic intensive apps, power hungry apps, such as video encoders, and such, and games. There is a total of about 10 programs on my pc. Most of these cannot be made portable anyway, but such is life I guess.

Also I work for a company that locks the pcs so tight, you can only do certains things with the progs they say you can install. I use my apps usb to use the ones I need to get my work done right without the hassle of the applications request process.

SO, I am a hardcore usb apps user, you could say, but I do continue to find ways to make it easier everyday.

Deuce
"Portable Software: Just the beginning..."

Yes, "portable living" suits me just fine. All of my necessary applications and (with a 1G flash drive) most all of my data files can go with me where ever I go. Digital photos and MP3 files are stored on an external USB hard drive (for portability).

With all the available portable apps and the fact that I use more than one PC during the course of a day, I'm finding it hard to justify locally installed, non-portable applications. MS Office was a big hurdle to get over but thanks to John and Portable OpenOffice that's behind me now. Great job! My two "workhorse" apps" (TreeDBNotes and EditPlus) are not yet completely portable but they are close enough to be run from a flash drive.

The only thing left on my home desktop PC is scanner software, Quick Time and ITunes (this will be going away soon).

This site, BTW, is a great source of information. Many thanks to the admin.

Richard Moore

I live semi-portable. All my work email is processed through portable thunderbird. I have several other apps such as open office, firefox, etc plus several apps that I have customized or have written so that I can perform my job while traveling. I do however, have many programs that I run off of either my work or home computer just because they are faster. USB 2.0 is not bad, but I am not always lucky enough to have that option. If you are running your usb drive with USB 1.1, things can get kind of slow. In general, it is probably best to try it out and see what works for yourself. Everyone's situation differs and my solution may not be the best solution for your case.

Good Luck and happy portable apping!

I use portable apps primarily because of their versatility with lack of registry implications. I don't know of anyone who prefers Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs to pressing the Delete button! Portable Apps directories can easily be manipulated (renamed, moved etc).

Been living completely portable for about two weeks now, I had issues looking for a good outlook substitute, or it would have been for a few months longer. With the 6-gig I have, I can keep just about everything i need for work, plus some extra tunes on the side. I highly recommend it for just about anyone. If you are looking to completely drop any installed programs, I would recommend moving to windows 2000 rather than windows xp (if you have a legal copy lying around of course), it seems to allow for faster loading apps, and anyway its better than xp anyway

PS: In case anyone wants to know, ive found Barca2 to be an awesome outlook replacement. I know it isnt freeware, but its worth the investment.

6GB QuickiDrive
Ceedo / PStart / Xoblite
1.5 GB of portable application Goodness!