General Discussion

I've come to depend on my flash drive and PortableApps a lot, and lifetime of the drive has become an issue. They don't last forever, ya know. And now I need to buy a larger one.

I haven't been able to find any info on the relative quality or expected lifetime of the flash drives from the various manufacturers. Is there a difference in lifetime? Is there a "best" flash drive I can buy for reliability? Is there a brand I should avoid?

Is it possible to assign a drive letter to a usb...drive and have it been the same on each pc?

I've written an analysis on the viability of .NET-based software as portable apps. It analyzes the compatibility issues between different versions of the framework and which operating systems it's bundled with. It also includes a handy chart so you can easily see what .NET versions to appear where.
http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/dotnet_portable_apps/

CCleaner 2 is now out (beta version) and is portable. Just install it to your flash drive, run the program, tell it to save options to an .ini file. It installs the following files:

ccleaner.exe
winapp.ini
winreg.ini
winsys.ini

I wanted to start a discussion about the upcoming theming component in the PortableApps.com Menu/Platform. As a few people know, there are some options we're considering for it.

Theme Packaging - Zip

I am signed up for the newsletter, but I have never received it. I check my spam folder (both on the gmail site and in Thunderbird) but it never shows up there.

I was wondering if it is because Gmail is deleting it before I can check it there or if it was something else.

I have just uploaded Xenon Portable 1.0 (my file manager) to it's sourceforge project. I was thinking it would be handy to have here on PortableApps.com and in the Suites. It could be run when one presses the Docs, Pics, etc. buttons on the PAM. It has local file associations so they can be taken with you. It includes a program I wrote called 6-Zip that extracts archives using 7-Zip so end users can carry a zip program with them without having to use 7-Zip. Would you like to have it here?

May be this is not the right forum... it could be the off topic but...

if I right click on my Pdrive on WinXP and choose "Format", I have only 2 options... FAT and FAT32... I want to use FAT32 (current is format is FAT), but it only give me 979Mb, can I change that using command lines? I mean, it is supposed that with FAT32 I get more space, and I'm getting less, so how can I change it...

What is the command line (and command line options) to format my usb PDrive to FAT32?

Thanks in advance

Hello,

Can a usb flash drive be write protected if it doesn't come with a switch on it to do so?

Also to avoid writing to the flash drive, I could just drag the folder over to the computer im working on to use the app, then delete that folder and the computer would be as it was before I was there right (aside from possible temporary things, like RAM)?

Hello,

Do the portable apps write or erase from the thumb drive? I'm thinking they don't since it looks like atleast some of them can be run from a CD, but I want to be sure.

Also if its okay to ask, Once a drives write/erase cycles are maxed out, can the thumb drive still be read, and just not written to or erased? Or can it not even be read?

Thanks - Jason