Portable Applications, Redux

As my initiation into the road warrior world continues, I found myself last night in the position of being in a hotel and needing to print a PDF file. I marched downstairs to the hotel's business accommodations, where there were two computers, each connected to an inkjet printer. I logged onto the first computer, inserted my flash drive, opened the file and clicked "Print." The printer shortly belched out a completely blank page, and I noticed the "out of ink" light flashing. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just use the other computer." Of course, it wasn't that simple, as it turned out that the second computer didn't have a PDF reader installed, so I couldn't even open the file.

A few different possibilities occurred to me: I could take the ink cartridges out of printer #2 and put them in printer #1, or I could just swap the two printers altogether, as they were identical and there wouldn't be a driver problem. While I was cogitating, another hotel guest came in and started using the other computer, so I was stuck. At least I thought I was, until I thought about Portableapps.com.

Cover JerryStem and I posted here a while back about the existence of "portable" versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, versions that can be installed on a flash drive and used wherever there's a computer with an Internet connection. Great stuff. Now there are a lot of different applications available, including, as I found out, a nice PDF reader called Sumatra. I was able to go back up to my room, download it and install it on my flash drive, and then go back downstairs and print the document.

I strongly recommend that anyone who travels frequently visit Portableapps.com and see what they have to offer. It's all free, most of it is open-source, and having the applications literally in your pocket can maybe save the day when your home resources aren't available.

As an adjunct to Jim's post, note the price of thumb drives with gigabyte or larger capacity has fallen drastically since Christmas. I bought two 1 gig thumb drives at my local OfficeMax for $23 including sales tax. (It was a sale - two item limit.)

Some of the public computers available at hotels/motels I've stayed at had NO options to add external media (CDs, DVDs, 3-1/2 inch floppies, or thumb drives) for fear of "infection." Makes good sense to protect against "illegal copies" of software like Word, etc.

Wes Bucey said:

As an adjunct to Jim's post, note the price of thumb drives with gigabyte or larger capacity has fallen drastically since Christmas. I bought two 1 gig thumb drives at my local OfficeMax for $23 including sales tax. (It was a sale - two item limit.)

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I took advantage of the same deal. Being old, I'm still amazed that it's possible to carry around so much data in such a small, accessible package, especially when I think about my first home computer and its 40mb hard drive. I switched it out for one with 130mb of capacity, and the new drive cost something like $350.

Some of the public computers available at hotels/motels I've stayed at had NO options to add external media (CDs, DVDs, 3-1/2 inch floppies, or thumb drives) for fear of "infection." Makes good sense to protect against "illegal copies" of software like Word, etc.

Click to expand...

I don't doubt that that's true, but it almost totally negates the utility of having so-called business centers in hotels, because if you can't access your own files, there ain't much you can do.

Check out Tigerdirect's special if you want a 2GB flash drive (free after rebate). It also comes with CA Antivirus. I'm currently running this package on the system I just built, and it is very stable.

Wayne

Indeed the price of these usb flash drives is quite affordable these days.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820178143

This one is $50 after rebate for a 8gig. As Jim stated, it's amazing that so much data can be carried in such a small package, and so very useful. Thanks for the link, would be cool to carry some widely used apps around in your pocket for "just in case" purposes.

How about instead of just running small versions of programs from a USB you run a full OS that can run on any x86 computer you may find no matter what configeration its set up as.

Go to http://www.puppylinux.org and download version 2.14, burn the Image onto a CD-RW and then you got yourself a OS on a single disk that can save back onto itself.

Also if you want to do what I did I simply clicked the "Set up" option after booting the disk, installing it on a USB flash drive (in my case a small USB SD Card reader and a 256MB SD disk) and made a boot floppy that will allow me to boot on even really old computers that only boot on floppy which in the floppy contains "Wakepup v2" which will look for a Puppy OS CD or USB and load it automaticlly. So I run the OS and save back to my SD card. Never have to go on someone elses computer when your traveling and actually use their computer so to speak.

I'd probably get a bigger SD card now that they are dirt cheap my SD card is a couple of years old by now hense why its so small. Maybe a GB or 2 and you'll be able to save alot on that card and truely replace the need to carry a laptop as you'll have plenty of space for your OS and all your files and even some music. That 8GB USB flash would work quite well in my opinion in this type of application!

Dimitri

Thanks for the link to portableapps.com - I'd never heard of this until today!