Computersight -

 Welcome to Week 2 of my Program of the Week series, my goal is to write an article every week on a program that may or may not be useful to you the reader, so far I have not hit this goal as its been nearly two weeks since I posted my first article. Hopefully after Christmas I will be able to do this on a more regular schedule. Anyway on to this weeks program: PortableApps

Now have you ever been into one of your local retail stores looking for a USB Drive? There’s quite an overwhelming selection, you have choices of brand, space, ones with security on them, ones with U3 and ones without. But which ones do you get? First you decide how much space you need and that narrows things down a lot but then you’re left with the drive with U3 or one without. To boot the one with U3 is like $50 more. So what makes U3 so much more special? Well quite frankly NOTHING! (I do believe U3 is not quite as abundant as it used to be, it kind of failed in the marketplace, not saying you still cannot buy one with U3 but they are still not worth the extra money).

Well here’s some basic info on U3, essentially it allows you to run a program from your USB drive which can be quite useful. There are various applications you can run from web browsers to games, etc but the big problem is that the technology is proprietary and some cost money. For more information on U3 go to here. If you want to see some of the applications available you can go here. I will not get into this anymore and head on to the point of the article!

If are ok with spending that extra money on a U3 drive and then paying for programs that are not on the drive that you may need then feel free I won’t stop you! If you would like a free alternative to U3 then read on! This free solution is called PortableApps.

There are a few differences between U3 and PortableApps.

1.       It’s FREE

2.       You can add ANY  program to it (if it will run portably then it will work)

3.       It’s open source

4.       You can put it on any of your drives as long as space permits it!

5.       Works on Windows 95*/98*/Me*/2000/XP/Vista and Wine under Linux/UNIX/BSD/Mac OS X (although                 the program you are trying to run within PortableApps must work under that OS as well)

The first thing you need to do is go to their website which can give you some more information on it. You can go directly to their download page by clicking here. Now you will be given three choices, the differences being what programs you will get as part of their package. The choices are

•          Platform only
•          Suite Light
•          Suite Standard

Platform only, just gives you the PortableApps software with nothing extra. Suite Light adds a bunch of programs like a web browser, email client, antivirus, games, media player, etc. Suite Standard includes what light has but adds openoffice as its word processor instead of abiword. Each suite ranges in space requirements as well, 1.3mb, 150mb, 355mb respectively. There is also multilingual support, the Suites are in English so if you need another language you may have to look into just the platform and then adding the programs you want in your language. After you have finished with download you may install it onto your usb drive. Do so is as easy as plugging in your drive and running the install file.  Installing applications afterward is as easy as downloading them from the portable apps site and running install file, it will automatically integrate with PortableApps.

One of the best features is that you can add any program to this platform as long as it is able to run portably and has an .exe as executable. You are not limited to the PortableApps website for your portable applications. For example I used the standard suite and then added programs like ccleaner, mikogo, pc wizard, Damn Small Linux(had to change .bat to .exe using converter, leave a comment with email address and I can tell you how), among others. I will not go into too much detail on each of the programs as they will be future entries in the weeks to come. To do this you copy the folder for the program into the PortableApps folder on your drive. Then when you load up PortableApps you will see the program in the list.

To load up PortableApps you will see a StartPortableApps.exe file on your usb drive, when you load it up it will load a tray icon near your clock, from there it acts very much like your start menu. You will see a list of all your programs that you have available to you, you may also rename the items in the list without affecting actual program (simply by right clicking on item you want to change). One thing to keep in mind is that some programs will run portably but there may be more than one .exe file in the folder. (like an uninstall.exe or something like that) you can simply delete the extra .exe or rename it so it does not have the .exe extension, otherwise you will have some extra programs in the list.

Another excellent source for programs is www.sourceforge.net, I was using a program called FreeFileSyncand tried it out portably, it worked but then I discovered that there was a PortableApps version available on SourceForge (if you look under all files it’s the installer with paf in the name. This just means easier integration into PortableApps; I wish they would add this to the PortableApps website as this is a good program for doing backups and just ensuring folders are identical.

Check out my other article in this series about a program called Dropbox (which you could probably integrate with PortableApps).

•          Dropbox