The8thWonder.org

You might be surprised that your memory stick/USB flash drive/ipod/mp3 player could do a lot than what you had bought it for.

If memory serves me right, I had bought my first USB memory stick (about 256K) about 4 years ago just to transfer files between my computers. Then until about last year they were just laying around doing nothing

Portable Apps – I found Portable Apps by surprise almost a year ago. I used to carry my laptop to work just to check my emails (yeah I could have used a browser based email system but I like the idea of using a stand alone email client – Thunderbird in this case and always like to keep track of my emails). Anyway, I didn’t like the idea of carrying my laptop to work and also didn’t like the idea of using the work computer to browse through sites thereby leaving my personal information on my work computer. So I started doing my research and came across portableapps.com

You may think of Portable Apps like carrying your personal applications on your USB memory stick and its free

Once you have loaded Portable Apps to your USB flash drive, as soon as you plug in your flash drive to a USB port, Portable Apps should launch and here is what the launch menu should look like

It might take a while depending on how fast your computer is and what kind of drive you are using. Then you can launch your application from the launch pad by clicking it. Here is how the Thunderbird portable looks like when it starts.

If you are concerned about your flash drive being lost or stolen, then you could spend some extra money and buy an U3 smart drive – it has a software based authentication for your flash drive (you may think of this as a wrapper around your USB flash drive). But I should mention this is hackable but U3 smart drives provides an extra layer of security.

Here is how it looks when you plug in your U3 smart drive – you need to authenticate to get to the launchpad.

U3 Launchpad

As you could see from above I use a portable U3 version of Firefox, Skype, Trillion (similar to Pidgin/Gaim), OpenOffice (replacement for MS Office), Syncback, eWallet. Also I use portable version of Thunderbird from portableapps.com – Did I mention that all the above portable apps are available for free?

With U3 smart drive you could have multiple launchpads on the same drive.

You can read more information on Portable Apps here.

You can read more information on U3 smart drive here.