Portable Software

I am becoming a big fan of portable software. Most software with the "portable" label is designed to allow you to run it directly from a USB disk or an SD card or something similar, but in addition to those there are a number of small programs and utilities which are portable not by specific design, but simply by the fact that they are tiny, self-contained and don't litter the place up with unnecessary registry entries, support files and other nonsense.

In my particular case, I find I am using more and more portable software because it's easier to maintain across multiple computers/devices. I have a laptop that travels with me wherever I go, a computer on my desk at work, a desktop used for gaming and application development, the wife's computer at home, a second older laptop that (will be) used as a file server whenever I put the hard drive back in it, and a dozen or so USB drives, SD cards and external hard drives. Having one set of portable software and utilites - especially ones I can run across network - makes things much simpler.

As a side note, speaking of external hard drives, I picked up a masscool hard drive adapter the other day. I went looking for a 2.5 to 3.5 IDE drive adapter, and found this thing for the same price (about $20). It takes 2.5 IDE, 3.5 IDE and SATA drives all to USB. You can even hook up more than one drive at once.

In any case, back to portable software, the kids over at PortableApps.com do a nice job of keeping a package of portable software and utilities together - especially pretty standard stuff like FireFox and OpenOffice.

I have one problem with PortableApps.com, though, and that is their menu-loader, which allows you to organize and run the applications off a USB disk, only works with their packages. If you have another utility, you either have to use a workaround or skip the menu.

Today I found another nice little menu though, Pegtop Pstart, which has the nice add-on of also keeping short notes for you - something I'm forever doing in text files. You can also create shortcuts to folders. Probably the best bit of all, however, is the fact that you can run multiple instances concurrently (for different drives, perhaps, or different menu trees) without conflicting with each other. It is even possible to change the color of the tray icon so you can tell the different menus apart.

As a second runner-up in my search for a better menu was Porta'Menu by Jose Falcao. It's a quick menu, if you just want something that's small and works. (Small and works being the two biggest requirements of portable software.)

Porta'Menu lost in my comparison because I really liked the notes feature of Pstart, but Jose Falcao deserved a mention because he has a lot of other handy-looking, freeware utilities. The tiny calculator even has a viewable tape, something ever calc should have.

I have a respect for any software developer who creates, out of necessity or design or luck, software that just gets the job done, without any random nonsense added.