Essential Portable Apps

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.

µTorrent
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.

Filed under Free Apps & Tools, Portable USB Drive Apps
Tags: portable apps, PStart, PuTTY, RSS, USB drive