Portable Apps - Carry All Your Software in Your Pocket

In several posts in the past, I have mentioned portable versions of software.  Portable software titles are specially designed to be self-contained so that they can be run directly without any installation process.  This means that the user can place the program file/folder on any memory device (USB thumb drive, SD card, portable hard drive) connect that device to any Windows Machine and run the program, complete with saved preferences.  Portable software is usually limited to open source or other free packages, but this is not necessarily a huge limitation.

Portable Apps are the ideal solution for folks who may not be able to afford a laptop or may not want to be burdened by carrying one around.  The recent increases in storage capacity for USB thumb drives mean that you can easily carry all your applications and all your data on a $50 device smaller than a pack of gum.  Planning on travelling this summer?  Take along your Internet browser (complete with all your favourites/bookmarks), your email client (pre-configured), your photo editor, your music and a media player, even a copy of Skype to phone home with.  Then, to play it safe, transfer all your photos to your thumb drive so that you have backup copies should something happen to your camera.
There is even a website dedicated to making portable apps accessible, portableapps.com.  At portableapps.com, you can not only find your favourite open-source software, you can also download a menu system which will run automatically when you connect your portable storage device (thumb drive, ...) to any Windows computer.  Here is a brief list of some of the most common portable applications:

• Open Office (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations)
• Google Chrome (browser)
• Firefox (browser)
• Thunderbird (email client)
• GIMP (bitmap graphics & photo editing)
• Inkscape (vector graphics)
• Audacity (sound editing)
• VLC (media player)
• Infrarecorder (CD/DVD burning)
• Filezilla (FTP client)
• Pidgin (chat client)
• Skype (chat/video client)
• Utorrent (torrent client)
• 7-Zip (compression utility)
• ClamWin (anti-virus)
• and many other games, utilities, ...