Windows functionality on the go

Craig Simms | Jul 4, 2006 5:06 PM
Expand your application choices with USB flash drives and portable software.
You know how it is -- you’re at work, uni, or even at a friend’s house and you can’t get your hands on the application you need because it’s at home. Well you don’t have to be crippled -- why not grab that 512MB USB stick of yours and get yourself portable with some choice applications that run right off the stick? And who knows, if security is particularly lax at your destination, it might even help you to get that IM client running that you previously couldn’t… and let’s face it, it’s always nice to leave a PC without leaving a trace as well.

67/512MB
Portable Firefox
You’re not an IE fan, that’s fine. Running a browser off a USB key also has the added bonus of not having to clean up your tracks after your done on a machine. Nifty! If you consider yourself more musical, try portable Opera.

88/512MB
Portable Thunderbird
Webmail can often be banned from the workplace, so running your own email client is quite handy. You may want to set it to leave email on the server, just so your thumb drive doesn’t fill up. If you want to be even sneakier and have access to a command prompt, you could try a combination of SSHing into your home machine and running a text client such as PINE or MUTT -- using a console always makes you look like you’re doing work.

90/512MB
Calendar Extension for Thunderbird
So you’re too stingy to buy a PDA, yet you still want a calendar on hand at all times to see how things are progressing. The Thunderbird calendar extension is exactly like Sunbird, just without the executable overhead, and will allow you to stick your USB into any computer and organise your schedule, regardless of where you are. Well, except maybe the bush. Or the moon. Or places without electricity. Or computers for that matter.

98/512MB
Deep Burner Portable
‘But… but… it has a DVD burner’ you cry at the terminal, despite the complete lack of burning software available and installation of such programs being locked out at the administrative level. Deep Burner should help you rectify this problem for good, and consequently let you take your work home if you run out of space on your thumb drive.

124/512MB
MAME
Okay, so this one highly depends on the size of your ROM collection, but MAME can help wile away a boring lecture whilst having the impression of making you look like you’re working really hard. Just make sure to look up at the lecturer every now and then -- make it part of the game. Robotron is so much harder when you’re not looking at the screen.

50/512MB
Damn Small Linux (DSL)
Bootable from your USB key, providing of course that the motherboard supports it and the BIOS can also be accessed. Failing that, there’s also an embedded version that runs from within Windows. A full list of applications included are at the web address above, and you can even roll your own DSL pretty easily to include the applications you want – just be aware of your space budget! If you’re painfully conscious of being tracked at different terminals, this is the way to keep your privacy intact.

125/512MB
7-zip
Insane compression at the right price: free. 7-zip will let you fit oh so much more on your portable storage if you find yourself running out of space. The usual program is included in an installer, so click on the Downloads link on the left, and download the command line version – this will get you a zip file which you can extract and use independently. Just make sure you have access to the command prompt in the first place!

134/512MB
Portable GAIM
Although the proliferation and popularity of MSN can be arguably attributed to its default inclusion in Windows and sysadmin’s apparent laziness in not removing it, other protocols can be nice too. Portable GAIM means you can chat the day away instead of doing proper work. Not that you shouldn’t be doing proper work.

161/512MB
VLC
You can’t trust a sysadmin to have installed all the codecs required to watch video, which unfortunately makes Media Player Classic a little useless. VideoLan Client should fill that gap by including embedded codecs -- just make sure its always kept up to date, and ensure to grab the zip download, not the installer .exe!

163/512MB
FreeDOS
The nasty admin has taken away our command line, robbing us of one of the most powerful ways to achieve things, let alone buck the system. Let’s put one back in by throwing FreeDOS on the drive. Grab the 1.44MB version from the latest distro folder, run command.com and you’re away -- you may have to download something like WinImage to extract it though, and you may want to refamiliarise yourself with the 8.1 DOS format. Of course this can be expanded with any other command line tool you care to use (try http://www.unxutils.sourceforge.net/ for starters), making it an immensely powerful thing to have portable.

164/512MB
F@H
When proteins in the body are carrying out tasks, they arrange themselves first -- this is known as folding. When a protein folds incorrectly, this can cause all sorts of diseases. Folding is still not completely understood, and so Folding @ Home was developed, a distributed application to help solve the problem, using CPUs all around the world. There’s even a team competition. While we don’t condone elicit ‘borging’ of machines, it’s always nice to be able to use the CPU cycles of the machine you’re currently using to crunch a WU. You could even add it to an autorun file so every time you insert your USB key in a machine, it starts up automatically.

165/512MB
SIW
System Information for Windows, in a single handy executable. Sometimes you just need to know the specs of a machine before you work on it, and there’s no way normally to pull the amount of information required – SIW is your saviour.

171/512MB
Putty + UltraVNC
Sometimes you just have to access your home machine, whether to check on your downloads, to grab an extra file that you forgot to bring with you or even just to check everything is still running smoothly. These two apps should help you do that – providing you’ve set up a VNC listener and SSH server on the other end, of course.

172/512MB
uTorrent
Always going to be contentious, since people are protective of their bandwidth. Nonetheless if you can get away with using a torrent program, at 154KB uTorrent is easily the way to go.

182/512MB
Audacity
We’ve often found ourselves in a fix where we need to chop a sound quickly, and yet all that’s been available is the paltry Windows File Recorder. Audacity offers a downloadable zip version that will happily run off your flash drive, opening the metaphorical audio barn doors for all.

184/512MB
NotePad++
A freaking awesome little program that happily obeys the three Fs – fast, functional and free. A powerful text editor that doesn’t need installation, fulfilling our requirements nicely.

188/512MB
Portable FileZilla
If you don’t feel like mucking about in the command line FTP, FileZilla is here to help. While FileZilla is normally portable in itself, this version is considerably smaller.

200/512MB
XnView Minimal + Plugins
Image viewer that doesn’t require installation, and pretty much loads any format you wish to throw at it, even audio. Pretty much required, considering how terrible Windows’ default viewer is.

367/512MB
Portable Open Office
If, for some weird reason the PC you’re sitting at doesn’t have Word or Excel, then you can thankfully run Open Office directly with little qualms, making a nice interim job until you can get back to the real thing.

368/512MB
1by1
Tiny, tiny audio player that’ll simply play MP3s in a folder. Extract the .exe to a folder rather than installing it (by using WinRAR for example) and it’s set to go. If you need something that looks a little more like your traditional MP3 player, you may want to check out XmPlay.

371/512MB
FoxIT Reader
For whatever reason, some sysadmins just don’t install Adobe Reader. FoxIT will help alleviate your pain.

Most of the above programs will keep you satiated -- however there’s no doubt you’ll find small, portable and easy to use programs elsewhere that you’ll want to add to the collection. Plus there’s just over 140MB left for documents, drivers and so forth -- nothing that should be filled too quickly unless you do graphic design, sound or video, or intend to store programs on your drive.

Come to think of it, perhaps you’d better splash out on that 1GB, or even 4GB flash drive, you know, just so you can keep everything by your side… you never know when you might need it.
This article appeared in the July, 2006 issue of PC Authority.