Creating a Handy Flash Drive

Have you experienced going into an Internet cafe or a friend's house but found out that their machines is lacking the programs that you need? You can't install programs on their machines but you really need that FTP client or that unRAR program.

Enter PortableApps. These are free applications you can install in your flash drive and are good to go when you plug it in a computer (provided that it's running the appropriate OS). The following are my top 5 applications that a flash drive should have:

• Firefox Portable Edition (25MB) - Now you can carry your own Firefox web browser with your bookmarks intact. Useful for storing those bookmarks you need for your thesis.
  
• 7-Zip Portable (2.1MB) - This is the file archiver (compression) utility that I use in my PC and it's nice to have this available wherever you go to access and extract those ZIP, RAR, GZ, ISO, etc. files.
• ClamWin Portable (20MB) - Anti-virus on the go if you don't trust other computers to have the latest virus definitions.
  
• Miranda IM Portable (4.2MB) - This is the portable version of the Instant Messaging App that supports ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc. Now you don't have to leave traces of your archives and buddy list on the host machine.
• VLC Media Player Portable (16.6MB) - A handy portable media player that can view MOV, FLV, MKV, 3GP, MP4, WMV, etc. video files.
  

There are other applications in the site that you may find useful such as a portable Apache server, FTP client and even a classic MAC OS.

Although not really required, it's nice if you also have the PortableApps.com Menu installed which allows you to have something like the Windows Start Menu environment for your portable apps. And also read their guide on safe portable app-ing which is very helpful.

Now you can still make your old 256MB flash drive sitting in your drawer useful.

Be sure to check my guide on how to protect your external disks from worms