So you’ve decided to finally take a trip to some far off place and wanted to bring some of your favourite applications along for the ride. The problem is, you don’t want to be lugging your laptop around, or perhaps you’re afraid that it will get stolen. Before you stress out and start leafing through the local yellow pages for a ‘Shrink’, take a look at portableapps.com first.

At portableapps.com you will find standalone versions of many popular open source software applications, which you can install directly onto a USB stick. Some of the more popular standalone programs include Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, or Anti-Virus program Clamwin, there’s even a full office productivity suite OpenOffice. Once installed onto the memory stick, the programs run as if installed directly onto the computers hard drive. The great aspect of this program is the capacity to store your emails, bookmarks and so on. You have access to the information as well as the applications that run them, which is an absolute convenience.

On the negative, there are currently no programs offered by portableapps.com to help protect your data if you lose the memory stick. But if you are extremely resourceful, you could always install TrueCrypt encryption program from www.truecrypt.org to encrypt and password protect your data.

Overall, I find portableapps a very useful tool that has added to my productivity as well as peace of mind.

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