Portable Applications

A few monts ago I wrote about Portable Applications. It appears now that there are a lot more applications than I thought at the time of writing that entry: there is U3, which I don’t like, because it is commercial software, and there is WinPenPack. This is really great: slightly more difficult than Portable Apps to install software, but it even has Java on it, so I can run e.g. Celestia and Freemind, a MindMap program. There is even a Digital Audio Workstation (Frinika) on it.

On my 4GB thumbdrive (with U3, PortableApps and WinPenPack on it) I have too much software to list here, but I hope you get the point when I say that there is only slightly more than 100MB left for data.

Of course there are some programs that are not fit to run portable. So I use a second – 2GB – thumbdrive with MojoPack on it, a program that gives me the opportunity to run software that is in itself not portable in a windows-like environment. In fact it is a portable windows XP that runs on a host computer. A bit slow, and – unfortunately – still not good enough to have my music notation software (Finale) on my stick – I think I have to solve the problem of musical fonts.

The problem now is that I still need a device to store my data; I bought another USB Flash drive (4 GB) for this purpose. I’m desperately waiting for the next generation Thumb Drives, with more storage capacity and enough speed.

I never leave the house without my 3 USB flash drives, a 2 GB mp3-player (no i-Pod; the € 35 player I own is good enough for my needs), a voice recorder and a mobile phone in my pocket. My Moleskine Notebook, a pocket chess-game and a book for study or reading are in my bag. Always worrying about getting bored at work 🙂