Da Vinci Planet » Portable USB Drive Apps

Portable PuTTY Tray

Da Vinci — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:43:10 +0000

PuTTY is a popular free, open source Telnet and SSH client. Being open source there are many PuTTY variations, one of the more popular being portaPuTTY which I have recommended as an essential portable app before. I found a new favorite called PuTTY Tray: It is another variation of PuTTY, but offers some interesting features including:

Minimizes to the system tray

Configurable window transparency (useless, but looks cool!)

URL hyperlinking

Can be configured to be a portable app

Reconnects from PC stand-by and connection failures

Remove Unwanted Programs with Revo Uninstaller Portable App

Da Vinci — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 02:40:57 +0000

If your system is suffering with performance issues or is simply cluttered with old applications then Revo Uninstaller could save you time vs. a full Windows reinstall. Revo Uninstaller shows you all applications and components installed on your PC and allows you to remove unwanted apps. It does a scan before and after the uninstall to find files, folders and registry keys that may have been missed during the uninstall process. In Hunter Mode, you can uninstall programs with one click or by simply dragging application shortcuts on your desktop or quick launch bar to the Revo Uninstaller system tray icon. A portable app version is now available so you can now run it from a USB drive without installing it.

In addition, Revo Uninstaller also comes bundled with other useful utilities like the Autorun Manager which let’s you enable or disable programs that autostart at Windows startup and the Junk Files Cleaner which scans and deletes temporary files that should have been deleted.

Revo Uninstaller is portable, free and with no spyware or tricks – a great productivity tool just the way we like it.

Revo Uninstaller (Look for the Portable version download link)

USB Apps Update

Da Vinci — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 03:30:09 +0000

Portable apps have proven to be very popular and quite resilient in spite of the popularity of on-line apps. On-line apps like Google Apps, Zoho and Basecamp offer solutions for collaboration and portability, but there aren’t many good on-line solutions for applications like text editors, image editors, operating systems and browsers. Because of the need for these types of applications and the benefits of using USB apps I have been adding to my USB app collection. To be fair I have replaced some portable apps with on-line apps, e.g. I prefer Google Reader to GreatNews because desktop RSS readers become bloated and slow down as you add feeds, but at the same time I have discovered a few new portable applications.

SIW – System Information for Windows provides detailed information about your Windows computer, including hardware specs, software and drivers. SIW can reveal passwords and software serial numbers or registration keys. The information can be exported to text documents which is a handy backup to have.

Ad-Aware – Probably the best free spyware detection software. Ad-Aware can be made portable by downloading and installing as normal and then simply copying the installed folder to a USB drive.

Damn Small Linux – DSL is basically a fully functional desktop squashed into 50MB of space. It has a fairly friendly GUI and includes most of the typical applications one might need. What’s the purpose? It offers a rich set of tools that you can use on a locked down or problematic computer. There are many other alternatives (e.g. Bart PE portable or Ubuntu virtual appliance)

Why you should use Portable Applications

Da Vinci — Sun, 06 May 2007 22:57:23 +0000

Most people know that I am a portable app fan and that I would almost exclusively try to use portable applications or Web applications rather than “installs”. The problem with regular, non-portable applications is that they rely on the Windows registry and that they are typically distributed in many folders. So when you need to reinstall Window all your settings are lost and you need to completely reinstall the applications. In this post I would like to describe the reasons why I prefer portable apps and how you can manage them better.

Why use portable apps?

Light weight. Portable applications do not require installation and therefore (normally) do not fill your registry with unnecessary junk. So one does not experience performance degradation when you add apps. Besides, portable apps are normally created to fit on USB drives so they are small and efficient.
Portable. Portability doesnâ€™t only apply to USB drives, it also allows you to copy your apps between computers. So for instance, I keep all my portable apps in my d:\Portable folder and can easily copy that folder to other computers without needing to install the applications on the other computer. That way I can have my favorite apps on my home and work computer. By synching (see below) them up I am also able to keep all data related to the portable apps on both computers. Another nice thing about portable apps is that when you reinstall Windows or have a re-image as we often do at work, you do not need to download, install and configure your apps because theyâ€™re all self contained in your portable folder.

PStart application launcher

PStart is a simple tray tool to start user defined applications. PStart is itself a portable application and can be used to launch your portable apps similar to the Windows Start button. The nice thing about PStart is that if you copy it along with your portable apps to a USB key or other computer all the settings get copied as well. So it provides an easy way to launch your portable apps the same way on any computer.

Synchronizing portable applications between computers

I use SyncBack (look for the freeware download) for regular backups, but I also use it to synchronize my portable apps folders between computers. By scheduling a daily sync I have access to the same apps and data on my home and my work computer.

A nice side-effect of applications that are built to be portable is that they are normally not copy protected. Copy protection would defeat portability and as a result they are normally free.

Note-Taking Applications

Da Vinci — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 23:51:55 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks I tested various note-taking applications. I was looking for software to help me to better organize my typical daily notes, memos, ideas, to-do lists and to clean up the myriads of text files that I have used for the purpose. KeePass is perfect for saving and organizing passwords, but there are many other important snippets of text that didn’t have a good home. The criterion is that I wanted a free, light-weight and portable note-taking application to help me be more productive. There are hundreds of on-line tools, but I prefer off-line tools for this purpose and I also discovered dozens of sticky note applications which I find generally messy. Wherever I looked, EverNote showed up and it turned out to be my favorite, but other applications that I reviewed include TiddlyWiki, NeoMem and wikidPad.

EverNote

EverNote can easily capture, store and quickly access common everyday memos like to-do lists, expenses, telephone numbers, and Web clips. With EverNote you can save your notes in categories, which really behave more like tags. It supports text, HTML, images and drag & drop type functionality. The EverNote database can be encrypted and you can also encrypt text within a note. Another nice feature is neat printing functionality – something that is missing from many similar tools. Itâ€™s not as light-weight as I had hoped (the portable version is about 12MB in size) and it took me a while to familiarize myself, but now I love it!

TiddlyWiki

When I first discovered TiddlyWiki I saw it as a very neat piece of HTML code, but didnâ€™t really see a purpose for it. More recently I realized its use as a note-taking application. Itâ€™s highly portable and has amazingly cool functionality for a single HTML file. Some users have complained that it becomes slow when it grows too large. There are also many enhanced versions like GTDTiddlyWiki and MonkeyGTD, both Getting Things Done adaptations of TiddlyWiki.

wikidPad

wikidPad isnâ€™t portable and itâ€™s also not really light-weight, but itâ€™s another very popular choice. Itâ€™s a standalone desktop wiki and actually very neat and fun to play with. It’s main feature is the ease with which you can cross-link notes, but it lacks rich features and the ability to copy and paste HTML and images.

NeoMem

NeoMem is like a word processor and database combined. Itâ€™s a more technical solution that allows you to define “classes” which describe the items that you want to store information about. It’s a good application for storing structured lists, but I found it too complex for regular note-taking.

Others Solutions

For a comprehensive list of mostly on-line tools, check out Fifty Ways to Take Notes. I left out Microsoft OneNote because it’s not free and some other solutions, like ZuluPad don’t offer much in their free versions. For now I am going to stick with EverNote.

Productivity Tools: WordWeb

Da Vinci — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 12:04:35 +0000

WordWeb is a free English dictionary and thesaurus application, and can be used to look up words in just one click. This is a very handy productivity tool and it’s really fast. I found their “for free use” licensing agreement quite amusing (though I fail on both accounts!):

You may use the program free of charge indefinitely only if
* You take at most 4 flights (2 return flights) in any 12 month period
* AND you do not own or regularly drive an SUV (sports utility vehicle).

I also like that it can be installed as a portable USB application (under Advanced Options during install).

Via Lifehacker

Universal Extractor: The Portable Application Seeker’s Best Friend

Da Vinci — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:56:11 +0000

As a portable application addict, I have become rather resistant to installing applications. But then again, quite frequently, I want to try out new applications that typically seem to require installation. For example, applications that can be downloaded as Windows Installer (.msi) packages appear to need to be “installed”. However, quite often developers simply package their applications that way to make it easier for their users to install, yet the applications don’t really need to be installed and can run as portable applications. The Universal Extractor was designed as an easy, convenient way to extract files from installation packages. The Universal Extractor is itself available as an portable app (look for the UniExtract Binary Archive download link). Using this app you can extract the files of a .msi or .exe installation file, extract it to a folder and test if if works without installation. Note that this is not a hack to get larger, more complex applications to run as portable apps.

Google Talk Portable App

Da Vinci — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:47:13 +0000

Crazypack contains a number of useful portable applications and in particular Google Talk and Opera Browser. Doing a search on Google for “Google Talk Portable” doesn’t bring back many promising solutions so I was quite happy to find this one (and it works). I preferred to not use the pstart that comes bundled with Crazypack, so I only copied the individual portable apps that I wanted to my USB drive.

Productivity Tools: Screen Capture with WinSnap

Da Vinci — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:40:49 +0000

WinSnap is a great little application that can replace regular Windows screen captures. Previously mentioned FastStone Capture is great for scrolling screen captures like Web pages in browsers, but WinSnap is great for regular CTRL+Prnt Scrn replacement. It can be configured to automatically modify the image border to rounded corners or PhotoShop-style shadows.Â This is particularly useful for us bloggers who like to capture imagesÂ and post them to our blogs.Â Older versions are free (for personal, educational and non-commercial use) and as a bonus they have a portable version, so this application needs to be added to my list of essential portable applications. The free version is available here.

Productivity Tools: Copy and Paste Plain Text

Da Vinci — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 04:10:21 +0000

You know how annoying it is when you try to Copy & Paste formatted text from some applications like Web browsers and Word docs into other applications like Excel or Outlook and the formatting also gets copied!? PureText is a free and very light-weight productivity tool that pastes text as "plain text" without formatting.

If you are used to using command line tools for Copy & Paste, i.e. CTRL+C to copy and CTRL+V to paste then this little tool is a gem: You simply copy as usual using CTRL+C, but instead of using the CTRL+V hot-key to paste, you use the WINDOWS+V hot-key. (The WINDOWS key is the key with the Windows logo to the left of the [most-left] ALT key). PureText can be configured to use another hot-key combination, but the default makes sense and works for me.

PureText – plain text copy and paste app.

BartPE as a bootable USB app

Da Vinci — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 03:10:03 +0000

PC Magazine has an interesting article on making a bootable USB key using BartPE. There are obvious benefits for having a Windows liveCD or rescue disk, but if you are hooked onto your USB drive then you’ll know the value of having everything you need on one little portable drive rather than a bunch of CDs: USB drives are readily rewritable and small. Most new computers can boot from USB drives, but you should make sure to check your hardware. I am hoping for a portable VMware Player to solve these kinds of needs, but until then a bootable BartPE USB key is cool. B.t.w. Flashboot costs around $27, so use this solution if you want it free.

Essential Portable Apps

Da Vinci — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:52:15 +0000

Portable applications are becoming very popular and with good reason. Portable apps refer to applications that do not rely on registry settings and can run from USB memory sticks. That makes these applications easy to copy between computers and are therefore normally freeware. Another advantage is that they don’t need to be installed because they simply run from the folder where you downloaded and unzipped the files to. A beneficial side effect is that they don’t slow your computer down by adding registry settings and DLLs that are loaded into memory when the system starts up. The perfect application, in my opinion, is one that is free, portable, doesn’t require administrator priviledges and, of course, is useful. Here’s my list of essential portable apps and combined they take less than 512MB space.

To find out if an application is portable can be tricky and often an application may be promoted as portable but you need to find the right download because it’s default design isn’t. Typically a zip download (vs. exe) will be the portable one. I will try to indicate the portable version with each of the recommendations. All of the applications listed are free.

TrueCrypt
Free Open-Source Disk Encryption Software. TrueCrypt creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. Essential software even for non-portable use. Read the traveller mode documentation to understand it’s portability. If you are saving personal information to a USB drive, this is a must.

Firefox
Mozilla Firefox – Portable Edition is a true portable application: it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, including all your bookmarks and extensions.

KeePass Password Safe
Keepass is the best password manager around and it’s free, open source, lightweight and extremely secure.

ClamWin Antivirus
I have previously posted about ClamWin antivirus. ClamWin Portable is the portable version of the application.

portaPuTTY SSH Client
PuTTY is the free SSH client that we all love. “portaPuTTY is a hacked version of PuTTY that stores all its information in files, not in the registry.”

GreatNews RSS Reader
Lean, clean and fast RSS reader.

ÂµTorrent
A lightweight, yet full featured BitTorrent client.

Gaim Portable
The portable version of the popular IM client that supports AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber and Sametime (yes, even Sametime! ).

DeepBurner
CD and DVD burning application. To run DeepBurner Free Portable from your Flash drive, download it and then simply unzip onto your USB memory drive and run DeepBurner.exe.

VLC Media Player
A free, portable media player. Media players could be a p.i.t.a. so having it portable is a huge bonus.

FastStone Capture
FastStone Capture is a powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. Forget SnagIt, this is free, clean and portable!

NotePad++
Notepad++ is a free source code editor. It’s a great replacement for the default Notepad.

Nvu Web Authoring
Nvu is an easy to use Frontpage or DreamWeaver like application. Nvu Portable is just that.

FileZilla
FileZilla Portable is a portable FTP client so you can take your server list and settings with you.

7-Zip
Compression software for those situations where you don’t have access to WinZip.

HijackThis
A browser homepage hijackers detector and remover. An unpolished, but very powerful spyware detection app.

PStart
PStart is a tray tool to start user defined applications, especially for portable applications.

XAMPP Lite
XAMPP is an integrated server package of Apache, mySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin (the AMPP in XAMPP) that all run from a removable drive. You can even make WorPress portable using XAMPP.

While not really a portable application, SyncBack deservers a special mention. SyncBack is a really good backup utility and is very useful for synching USB drives with local hard disks. It is not a freeware application, but they offer older versions (still very good) for free.

VMware Live CD Player

Da Vinci — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 02:22:57 +0000

Live CDs have become quite popular, but I’ve always argued that it’s easier and more convenient to run virtual machines inside a host OS because it gives you the Internet and file access that you typically need when experimenting with something new. Never mind the hassle to actually burn live CDs. However, there are many more live CDs available than there are VMware virtual appliances. Here’s a neat little script that will enable you to launch a live CD, as an ISO image, inside VMware Player. Here’s what you need to do:

Of course you first need to have the VMware Player installed. (See previous post for more info)
Download the OS Integrated Live CD Player, available as a BitTorrent download from the VMware directory. If you don’t have a BitTorrent client try ÂµTorrent, a portable BitTorrent client.
Read the README.txt. For Windows it goes something like this:

There is no configuration script for Windows 2000/XP, so it will need to be configured manually.

From Windows Explorer, Click “Tools” -> “Folder Options”. Select the “File Types” tab and scroll down the list looking for the type with extension ISO (If it is not there, you will need to make one by clicking “New”). Highlight the ISO type and Click “Advanced”. Click “New” and under “Action:” give it a name like “Boot with VMware”. Under “Application used to perform action:”, give the filename with path to the ISOPLAYER.BAT script, followed by and switches you want and finally “%1″. It is important that the %1 be enclosed in quotation marks. Also make sure to enclose in quotes any filename that inclused spaces.

For example, you might type something like this:
“C:\isoplayer\isoplayer.bat” /d /vmware:”C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player\vmplayer.exe” “%1″

After this, click “Ok”.

So it really is easy to set up even though it doesn’t use an installation wizard. Once setup you can download and launch live CDs within a virtual machine without burning CDs and without installing anything!

Sudoku Portable

Da Vinci — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 13:51:21 +0000

The popular Sudoku game is avaliable at SourceForge in portable form so it requires no installation.

Sudoku Portable is a an addictive puzzle game originally created in France over 100 years ago. It features a 9×9 grid containing 9 3×3 grids. Within this you arrange the numbers 1 through 9. But, each number can only appear once in each of the 9 3×3 grids. And it can only appear once in each row and on each column. It’s a simple concept, but it can get addictive quickly.

Sudoku Portable – portableapps.com