General Discussion

I posted a question yesterday in the Firefox forum, and part of one of the answers I received surprised me--that thumb drives have a useful life. Yeah, I know I'm not tech savvy...

Is there a way to estimate how much longer a Thumb Drive will live? Can an app like this be developed? I think it would be handy; I'm worried about unexpectedly losing all my information.

Thanks, everyone. You're a helpful bunch.

The main reason I use portable software is not because it can be run from any computer (thats diffently a plus), but because I don't have to install it, and It doesn't make useless registry keys, or add files to where windows files only should go.

whats your reasion

Hey guys. I'm considering banning spamarrest.com and bluebottle.com email addresses from signing up for accounts and newsletters. The reason is that they both use challenge/response to prevent spam. C/R is a selfish method of dealing with spam that offloads the work to everyone trying to send the person email and results in additional spam to unrelated parties forged in from addresses. (SpamCop has a good explanation of why it's bad and why servers that do it are blocked.)

So, basically, with C/R, whenever someone signs up for an account or subscribes to the newsletter, I get an email telling me I have to click on a link and then sometimes perform a CAPTCHA (figure out what the distorted letters are)... all so they can get the mail they asked for. Now spamarrest and bluebottle apparently do this with all accounts, so I can block them and not have to worry about it anymore. I think this is preferable to letting folks think the signups don't work. Or waiting around until I eventually check that email account and bother with the C/R. For other accounts, like Earthlink, that only use it for people that turn it on, I'll probably just auto-delete the C/R messages as Earthlink is one of the annoying ones that makes you figure out a CAPTCHA and enter a description of what the email is.

can someone tell me, is it true that the port adobe CS2 can't use short cut?? b/c I try to do it, it doesn't work for me. another thing is when I use the stroke there are no colors for me to choose, it only has red, yellow and blue. is this suppose to be happen?????????

I'm using my portable applications more and more these days, even using the apps from my portable hard drive on my main PC at home.
There's plenty of programs that allow me to start my portable apps when I plug my hard drive in, but what about when I want to unplug my hard drive? Is there any application out there that can keep track of all the handles to the portable disk and either shut them down, or prompt me to shut them down? I would prefer if it didn't just kill the processes, but quit the associated programs cleanly. (I've been trying to kill stuff with a batch file, but it's not really what I want to do).

i have been roaming around this site for a few weeks now. i want to give you a piece of my mind and say... THANK YOU! you have made my life a more pleasant one. once there were only shades of grey, but now because your contributions to us all i have COLOR!

once again... THANK YOU!

and i'd like to thank those who help others out as well.

John, is there any chance that you'll add support for ${EXEDIR}\PortableApps\${APPNAME}\${APPNAME}.ini? (I think it's ${APPNAME}; could be ${NAME})

Hi everyone. I have been lurking here for a while and would like to see if it's possible to get a flash drive partitioned for use in this method. I have two unattended install images of Win2k and WinXP and would like to take a 2gb drive, partition it up, and get three bootable partitions, one for each install image and one for a bartPE boot for utilities and additional software.

I am interested in doing this because it has become common enough for a re-installation of the OS to a user's pc. Ideally, the install image would be updateable as service packs and hotfixes are released, which is part of why flash media is ideal. The other reason being small size vs CD's.

I recently bought a Vonage V-phone which is just a usb key. What is interesting is that Windows detects it as a CD-Drive which allows you to pull out the usb key without safely removing it. The software just closes itself after the usb has been pulled out. Does anyone know if or how to accomplish this with another usb key?

I found a portable search engine - Gaviri PocketSearch.
It is not free, but does have a good free trial.
The limitation is 2000 documents, but I don't think most people will have that many documents on their drive.
The site does not mention any time limits.
It is also avalible as U3.

Site: http://www.gaviri.com/site/index.jsp
Download (Windows) (old version, see note below): http://www.gaviri.com/site/downloads/PocketSearch-1.1.1.exe
Download (U3) (old version, see note below): http://www.gaviri.com/site/downloads/PocketSearch-1.1.1.u3p

EDIT: They changed their site, new link. Also they released a new version, but the new limit is 30 days, and the old limit is forever and 2000 documents.