Portable Software
Sat, 27 January, 2007 – 9:31 pm
Going away often, or even using multiple computers means that your whole perfected setup of browser, bookmarks, email accounts and favourite software needs to be duplicated somehow. I use two laptops at home, one for business and one for personal, I also go away a lot and try not to take my main laptop when I don't have to. So since converting a spare laptop harddrive into a portable drive, and also getting a 1GB pen drive late last year, it means that I can easily drop my work onto one of the drives and just put that in my pocket! So I've got a nice collection of portable software which I run and figured I'd list it out here incase anyone fancies grabbing a copy even to take to work (afterall, most IT depts don't want Firefox running as it's not as easy to track - so I've been told!).
- Mozilla Firefox - Web Browser
- Mozilla Thunderbird - Email Client
- FileZilla - FTP
- Xampp - Webserver, PHP (4 and 5), MySQL and more
- Irfanview - Image view and basic editor *
- PSPad - Code editor, good for scripting
* Irfanview is not strictly portable however I run this on my main computer and simply copied the directory from Program Files to my portable drive and it worked so I'm including it!
My feedreader now is Google Reader hence why I've not listed an RSS reader. There are plenty more applications available such as OpenOffice and the GIMP. You can find these and others at Portable Apps. This site stays on top of updates too such as Firefox and Thunderbird, which is really good.
With Firefox, I imported my bookmarks in which is handy as I don't want to rebuild that list! I've also added the basic extensions to the portable version too. Firefox simply runs like a normal version, you can update it, add extensions and themes, and save bookmarks.
Of course this is only useful if you have a computer to put your portable drive into! About 75% of my business trips are down to London which means we stop at my parents in Buckinghamshire. I then hijack my mum's laptop, simply plug my drive in and away we go 
Alternatively if I have to go down to the office that I contract for I can just plug the drive in there.
If you're often on the move or work between multiple computers, this is a great way to save time and hassle. Also as a sidenote, PSPad is a great editor for PHP. If I could combine that with HTML Kit we'd have a winner!
4 Responses to “Portable Software”
Kids use it all the time at work, and Ive been finding ways to stop them, because as you say its really hard to lock them down.
ID be wary in some corperate places using it tho, because you can lock it down through AD on a AD controlled network and Im sure on others, so its not 100% reliable - but very useful if its allowed
By Matt on Jan 28, 2007
Oh I would never recommend that someone try to bypass their own company's IT setup
What's AD?
By Sarah on Jan 31, 2007
Active Directory, its basically the system MS use for managing computers and users on a network.
By Matt on Feb 1, 2007
Ahhh I know Active Directory (well I know it exists and I can change a password under it!), just not as 'AD'.
By Sarah on Feb 1, 2007