Portable Applications: Get essential applications on pendrive

All of us are used to running Applications and Programmes from your computer. What if you can run the same applications from a USB drive or pen drive or thumb drive or what ever you call that cute little thing that you use to store information? The thing is, you can.

Portable Applications are useful if you do not have a lap top and you are using public computers. They are useful if your computer is controlled by an Administrator and you cannot add or remove applications from your computer. You can store your log in data or anything else on the Portable Applications, take them any where and they will work the same way they worked when you had them on last time.

For example, if you use Google Chrome to browse and you have the habit of saving bookmarks and password on your browser, Portable Google Chrome will help you do that on any computer and still have all the data with you. This means, ton a great extend you don't have to worry about leaving your password on a Public PC.

Installing a Portable Application is easy. If you have a USB Flash drive, the installer will prompt you and help you install it on the drive. And these portable applications are not version specific. You can run it on XP, Vista or Windows 7. [I have not tested it on Linux or Ubuntu]

I would like to share with you a few portable applications that I use.

1. Portable Google Chrome
2. Portable Google Chrome Beta
3. Portable Mozilla Firefox
4. Portable MSN Messenger 
5. Portable Skype
6. Portable Thunderbird 
7. Portable Open Office
8. Portable Yahoo Messenger 
9. GnuCash Portable
10. Sumatra PDF Portable 
11. VLC Media Player Portable 
12. Cool Player Portable 

I use a 4 GB Pendrive. These 12 applications do not even take half of that pendrive. I have converted the rest of the space into a folder that will allow me to save important documents that I want to take along when I go somewhere.