Carry your web browser with bookmarks and other settings on your pen drive

Have you ever had a quiet evening that you wanted to spend with your friend watching a movie turn into a virtual nightmare — all because of a stupid computer?

You spend hours downloading a movie from the Net and put it into your pen drive. And then the unthinkable happens. You insert the pen drive into your friend’s PC and the movie refuses to play. All because your friend does not have the requisite player.

The pen drive is a useful device to carry data; it is inexpensive and hassle free. But did you know that you can now also carry computer programs, along with your movies, songs, bookmarks, settings, email and more? You can use them on any Windows computer.

Here is the trick. Go to http://portableapps.com. The applications work with any hardware, be it a USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive or pen drive. All my important bookmarks are in my office computer. I can now carry my web browser with all the bookmarks and other settings on the pen drive. Fantastic, isn’t it? I have a .mpg movie. Somehow it refuses to play on Windows Media Player. I can now take along a portable version of the VLC media player with which I can watch the movie on any computer.

The possibilities are endless. Carry your calendar with all your appointments, take your email client with all your contacts and settings, your instant messenger and your buddy list, your whole office suite along with your documents and presentations, your antivirus program and even all your important passwords and account information securely.

For corporate people this is particularly important. You make a PowerPoint presentation, take it along for that important meeting only to find that the computer provided to you has an older version of PowerPoint which refuses to display all the special effects and music that you had inserted.

Here is where PortableApps comes in. OpenOffice.org Portable will open all your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Need to send a huge file across to your office from a remote place? You walk into a cyber café only to find that their computers do not have any FTP program. No sweat. Take along FileZilla Portable and send that stunning picture taken with your 8 mega-pixel camera.

Installing PortableApps is easy. Download the file at the top of the PortableApps Suite page and run it. It’s best to install it right in the root directory of your portable drive (H:\ where H is the drive letter). There are three editions available. One is the standard edition, which is about 89.5 MB, and the other is the Lite edition at 30 MB.

The Standard Edition comprises the antivirus ClamWin Portable, Firefox portable web browser, Gaim Portable for instant messaging, OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable, Mozilla Sunbird — Portable Edition (calendar/task manager) and the email client Mozilla Thunderbird Portable. A pen drive of 512MB should be sufficient.

If you want to pick and choose what applications you want to carry along, it is better to download the PortableApps Suite Base Edition. It is great for smaller drives. It installs the PortableApps Menu, PortableApps Backup utility and custom folders, icons and autorun. The third, Lite edition, has a word processor called AbiWord Portable.

Using the PortableApps suite is easy. Double click StartPortableApps.exe in the root of your portable drive. Follow the wizard. The PortableApps Menu can automatically add programs in the PortableApps format. Just download the file you’d like to add. Click Options in the PortableApps Menu. Next, select Add a New App—Install; and then select the FileZilla Portable .paf.exe file that you just downloaded. The PortableApps Menu will automatically install it in the proper location for you.

For those Macheads on Mac OS Classic 7 you can run the entire operating system from your pen drive. Linux on a stick is coming too. So be on the lookout.

Send in your computer-related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com. The solutions will appear soon