Digital Home Thoughts: Take Your Programs And Data With You

"PortableApps.com Suite™ is a complete collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, audio player, sudoku game, password manager, PDF reader, minesweeper clone, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you're ready to go."

For those of you who aren't quite ready to live in the cloud, the next best option is to bring all your applications and data with you. Portable programs differ from regular programs in that you do not have to install them; they run right out of the box. There are several benefits to this, such as being able to run your programs from any computer and also not leaving any stuff behind on a computer you just used. You can download and use each program individually, or use their "Launcher" which organizes everything for you, so that all your portable programs are available as a system tray menu.

Having used them in the past, I find the Launcher really handy, and customizing it with showing only the programs I use was easy peasy. The biggest limitation I found, aside from it being Windows only, was not the programs themselves, since they work as expected, but the USB Key I used. I found with some of the slower USB drives it would take ages to start. Investment in a high performance USB drives is a must if you want to go portable. I also would like to see a hot-key be able to bring up the Launcher. Still, I do have one USB drive with a full suite of PortableApps handy with me at all time. Anyone else go the portable route?