Portable Apps

[mtnbkr]

I know we've discussed this in the past, but I just took another look at it and was blown away.  Between what comes in the main package and what you can add after the fact, I have everything I need in a portable format.  Even OpenOffice is represented.  All of the apps run as fast off my SD card as they would off the hard drive too.  I even added Putty on my own and got it to appear in the menu (hint: create a PuttyPortable directory and drop the putty.exe file into it).

Web browser, email clients, disk utilities (zip, shred, antivirus, CD/DVD burner, etc), Office apps, games, chat clients, etc and so on. 

Chris

[roo_ster]

Not only do I use PA, but I turned on my company's lead for modeling & simulation on to it.

She was a new--coughcoughaffirmativeactioncoughcough--hire from one of the services with a new laptop super locked-down.  She needed a software DVD player for some MBA classes she was taking.

PA saved the day...and helped me get a much larger annual raise, I suspect.

[ctdonath]

I've started using it. Wonderful to have my most-used stuff ready to go pretty much anywhere anytime - better than hauling around my beloved ultraportable notebook.

Only flaw is the potential to lose the thumbdrive, which I nearly did last weekend.

Hope they get a whole lotta apps ported to that platform.
Nifty addition would be making 'em platform independent (Java based, emulators available, whatever) so it would run just as well on Linux or Mac as Windows.

[mtnbkr]

If they get enough apps for it, you could have a PC that was nothing but OS and storage, with all your apps on the thumbdrive.  I already have 90% of what I need on mine and the apps run almost as quickly as they do natively.

I've been working solely from the Portable Apps system today for those apps that are supported.  It was totally transparent other than version differences.

I haven't tried it yet, but I want to see how well Ubuntu runs from a thumbdrive (instead of a live CD).  With a 16g or larger thumbdrive, you could have an entire system and a good chunk of storage.

Chris