General Discussion

Hi all,
Pretty new here, but PAs are totally changing my life for the better! I've got a DiskGo 256MB USB watch and a OCZ Rally 1GB. At first I thought the watch (10mb/sec) read might be too slow. However, all applications I need basically run the same spead (once tweaked). Sorry to digress, just thought I'd let people know before they buy expensive USB drives.

What I would like to do is the following: have a launcher come up automatically everytime I plug in. I would also, like to have the drive either encypted (does doing this on the fly slow performance?) or at least password protected?

When I was investigating how well PAs would work for me I macro'd trials to test the speed of PFirefox.

Under the same conditions, switching every few seconds to make up for network fluctuations, PFirefox outperformed an identical regular Firefox. This happened after several thousand trials on 3 different computers with 3 different ISPs, for 6 different websites! I don't know how or why, but I love it!

Portable Firefox loaded identical pages faster than a regular Firefox install in all of 18 scenarios.. by between 3 and 21 percent faster!

Background:

I use up to 7 different computers a day, 4 to 5 at school, and 2 at home. I have a couple of programs that require absolute paths.

I am wondering if there is a way to make my USB Drive (80 GB Western Digital Passport) Mount on instead of the next available Drive letter (from G: to I: on differnet Computers). I've done this manually and after a reboot or after replugging, it reverts to the first available.

I'm wondering if there is some script that I can use to automount it at Drive X:.

Or would I have to use subst? I can use it, but it's not as tidy as I would like, even with a batch file. As the source path (G:, H:, etc) changes at different pcs, I would have to modify it each time to allow for this. Too much time spent. And two drive letters for one device. Or can you use a relative path is a batch file? I'm not that good at them myself, but I know the basics alright, and have experience with subst. Is there another way?

I don't normally like to post development stuff to the general forums, but as this will affect users of all the apps in general, I thought I would mention it here. I'm considering altering the directories used by the apps to streamline them a bit. I've posted about it here:
https://portableapps.com/node/1606

Please post any thoughts or comments to that thread.

So I was using a portable app (PhotoFiltre) on my flash drive, closed it, then removed the flash drive. I recieve a write error from WinXP. I put the drive back in, now that program plus half of my flash drive showed up as corrupt when trying to open the files.

I then removed the flash drive, then put it back in. Now when I try to open the drive, it says "Insert disk".

I tried accessing the drive thru the Admin Tools ->Disk Managerment, no luck.

This is the 3rd time this has happen to me. It use to happen alot when I streamed mp3s from my flash drive, 2 drives died that way. I stopped doing that, but now it happen when using a portable app.

Could be Protable Apps for Linux Systems created too?

Hi,
I created a small application called µStart. It works as a application launcher. But you can also open other files (e.g. .DOC) or other folders on your drive.

It is quite similar to PStart, but it is much smaller (only 68k) and has no fancy stuff (like application icons, maybe they will come in a later version) or notes functionality.

All path informations are stored as relative paths. It also allows to start applications automatically on launch and also to close most of them automatically.

On my homepage is a detailed (german) description, but µStart itself is english. You can at least take a look at the screenshots.

Does anyone know of any portable matrix calculators? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Does anyone know of any portable software like PSpice (just the schematics part). This is circuit design software used commonly in electrical, electronic... engineering. I basically just need software to draw circuit diagrams. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Had a corrupted permissions table that needed fixing in the database. Took a while to figure it out.

Seems it started earlier in the day and came to a head a little while ago. If you notice any other issues, please let me know.

Regards,
John