Apps on a stick

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OpenOffice Portable.

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Mozilla ThunderBird Portable and Mozilla Sunbird Portable.

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Sumatra PDF Portable.

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GNUCash Portable.

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All the necessary programs that are on your PC can, these days, be compressed into that little memory stick of yours. With memory sticks having increasing amounts of storage, they’re becoming ever more useful for storing all of your important programs. From your work, graphics and Internet programs to operating systems; you can have all on your memory stick.

As a starting point, you can visit www.portableapps.com. This is a useful resource that has numerous popular programs that have been turned into portable applications available for download. You can download the packages available online, or you can download programs individually one by one.

It’s merely a matter of downloading the packages to your portable drive and then running the programs. There are numerous advantages to running applications from your memory stick or portable drive. The first being ultra-portability, and the second being that if you use it on a another computer, you don’t leave a trace behind of your activities. It also doesn’t leave a registry behind, except for those automatically generated by Windows.

The reason for this is that the relevant application does not write to the Windows registry and, instead, stores settings in one or more configuration files, such as an INI file located in its directory. Portable applications can be run from USB drives, CDs, flash drives or even floppy disks.

Below is a list of some of what we think are the most useful programs for certain purposes.

Work

OpenOffice Portable

This popular open source alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite offers programs that give you the same functionality as the latter. By downloading it off Portableapps.com, you can use a number of the OpenOffice applications. From Base, Calc, Draw, Writer, Math and Impress; the suite is fairly comprehensive. It is slightly more basic version of the Open Office Suite for the PC, but it is sufficient enough for your need to be on the go.

Mozilla ThunderBird Portable and Mozilla Sunbird Portable

To complement your OpenOffice portable suite, the Mozilla ThunderBird and Mozilla Sunbird programs offer you email and calendar clients to keep you in touch and organised. With Mozilla Thunderbird you can take your contacts and email connectivity with you wherever you go. The portable version leaves no information behind on the machine that you use it on. Mozilla Sunbird offers you a calendar and a To Do list feature.

Sumatra PDF Portable

This is a PDF reader that, like Adobe Acrobat Reader, gives you the ability to view your all important PDF documents. It’s also a slimmer version of the full version of the open source Sumatra PDF, and its simplistic approach means that the focus is on merely viewing PDFs as opposed to anything else.

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