As your friend and mentor I feel a responsibility to let you know when I try a product which I find to either exceed expectations, or to be beneath my expectations. I am happy to say that PortableApps is a product which exceeds my expectations, and having unusually high standards for satisfaction in software, this is something you need to check out.

Targeted to those targeted to those who need their software on the go, PortableApps offers a fast, easy, comprehensive, and best of all free way to take your open source programs of choice (after all, generally open source programs are superior to their pay for use alternatives right?). What do you need? Something portable. A USB hard drive, or preferably a thumb drive will certainly do the trick. Once done, hop over to http://www.portableapps.com, download their suite which includes Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, and Sunbird, and ClamWin, and finally execute the freshly downloaded file, and install to the root of your portable storage device of choice. That’s really all there is to it. Now when you plugin your thumb drive, the auto play menu will have an option to load your PortableApps which is basically a start menu for your programs on the go.

If you decide that the applications included with the suite package are just not enough for you, then feel free to browse through the other offerings available for your consumption. I would personally recommend you get Notepad++, Filezilla, 7-Zip, and one of the available PDF readers.

That should do it. Try using the briefcase feature in Windows to sync some of your important documents to your portable storage device, and live it up.  If you need help on using briefcase, be sure to check out Microsoft’s article at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307885.