Da Vinci Planet » USB drive

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)

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.

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.

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.