Portable Life! March 12, 2007
Posted by Mark Tennant in : Computing , trackback
The idea of portable apps is something I have been following for a while: flash memory prices keep falling, meaning larger capacity USB flash drives are now available at cheap prices. (Amazon had a 4Gb one for £20 last week!). What all this means is that is should be possible to treat the flash drive like any disk and run applications off it. The problem of course is that most applications require settings to be installed into the windows registry, so they would only run on one machine.
I’m pleased to say that is all in the past - several technologies now allow you to install applications and their settings directly onto a USB flash drive. One of the easiest solutions comes from portableapps.com - All the software is well-known open source programs, hence they are completely free to distribute.
One of my favourites is Mozilla Sunbird - a personal information manager similar to outlook’s calendar. Full versions of openoffice, mozilla applications and even a web page editor (NVU) are available.
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