Note: This post is by guest blogger Lance Gallup. This is a very informative article, and I learned some neat things myself even though I have used portable applications before. Portable drives are getting more powerful and inexpensive all the time: I just noticed that one is being made available that has 250 GB for $199 US. That’s Impressive!
You say you’re burning the candle at both ends - working on projects and documents all day at the office, then packing up, going home and continuing into the evening? You say you’re tired of trying to keep your files synchronized between your work and home PC? You say you’re tired of lugging a bulky laptop back and forth every day and night? You say you want a revolution? Well, you know… we all want to change the world.
If any of these are true for you or if you’re just intrigued by keeping all your personal data and applications on an inexpensive, portable hard drive not much bigger than an iPod, maybe it’s time to consider living the portable life.
What are portable apps? Typically, when you install a Windows application, a new directory is created under c:\Program Files. Frequently, other component files are dropped into your Windows system folder(s), user folders, system registry and often other places around your computer’s hard drive. Usually, uninstalling an application will still leave pieces of the old application behind - orphan .dll’s and files and sometimes myriad registry entries. Partially because of this, frequent installing and uninstalling of programs and applications can slow your Windows computer to a crawl.
Another factor to consider is privacy. Especially if you’re working on a shared computer or office system, your data is out of your control much of the time. How do you know who else may be using the same system or snooping through cached information that may be of a very personal nature? Your resume, personal passwords, email, IM conversations, and other confidential information is fair game for anyone with a little knowledge and access to your hard drive.
Portable apps (http://portableapps.com/ and http://www.fosstools.org/) are central repositories for open source, free Windows based applications which can replace much of the functionality, bulk and expense of more familiar Windows apps such as Outlook, Word, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Norton AntiVirus, and others. Included in the list are portable versions of familiar, and already free staples like the popular Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client. They can be “installed” and run from a small portable drive or even a large capacity thumb drive and easily moved from machine to machine. Save your documents on the same drive and you can almost take your entire computing environment with you in your shirt pocket. Even better, when you unplug your drive you’re taking everything with you. Nothing is actually installed on the host machine and left behind. In fact, I’m writing this post using AbiWord portable which is installed and running from my pocket drive.
I’ve gone one step further. Though it might be beyond the scope of what a typical user would be willing to do, I enjoy pushing the envelope. My philosophy is often “Y?BIC!” (Why? Because I can!) I’ve installed a free version of VMWare server (you could also use player, which is also free) and carry around a custom configured Windows XP virtual machine in addition to my collection of portable apps. That allows me to run MS Money and a couple of other non-portable, commercial applications for which I haven’t yet found acceptable substitutes from my pocket 80 GB USB2 drive. I’ve been slowly migrating away from Windows to Ubuntu Linux for a while now, and VMWare allows me to easily bring up a copy of MS Money without leaving Ubuntu and booting Windows. I’ve also made a compressed, archival image of my primary machine with Norton Ghost and, you guessed it - keep it stored on my pocket drive as well. (Of course, the whole collection is also backed up on another drive in case of catastrophic failure of my pocket drive). Finally, with all of my data eggs in one basket like that, I’ve encrypted my private information using the excellent and free TrueCrypt program.
Keep in mind, you don’t have to go overboard and do all that I’ve done. Take a look at http://www.portableapps.com and see if it makes any sense for you. It’s all free software - the only investment is a little time and effort. Who knows? It might save you the cost of a visit to the chiropractor from lugging around that overstuffed laptop bag…!
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