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17 Must-Have Portable Apps for Your USB Flash Drive

Posted by JD on September 15, 2009

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You should push your flash drive to work harder, so you can be highly productive and have plenty of fun even if you are not using your own PC. These portable apps are light and you can run it immediately (without installation process), they’ll work great in any public PCs.

Truecrypt – Why is it first on the list? It’s obvious. An easy-to-lose, multi-gig, unencrypted flash drive with your important data on it; is a high security risk. This app can help in keeping all your private stuff locked down safely.

Operator - I’ve never really been a fan of Opera, but if you want to browse on a public computer, you should use Operator. It has a built-in anonymous browsing feature to keep you safe. But, if you’re on a trusted computer, you may opt for Portable Firefox.

Pidgin – A useful app if you need a quick instant messaging

Filezilla - The portable version of Filezilla will keeps all your sites accessible from wherever you are.

CCleaner - When you are traveling, you may find a lot of computers that have gigabytes of useless temporary files and bloated registry. CCleaner can make short work of dumping tons of trash files and tidy up the registry.

Revo Uninstaller - It will purge the filth off sluggish computers by ridding them of unwanted programs. Revo is way more powerful than Windows’s add/remove feature, and its “hunter mode” quickly uproots stubborn apps.

Treesize Free - If you suddenly get a hard disk full warning. Treesize can make drive cleanup a snap by identifying unusually large folders.

CDBurner XP - Burning software tends to be big. CD Burner XP offers quick burning capability while using other PCs.

Screamer - Great for accessing internet radio streams

VDownloader - Sometimes we stumble across a totally amazing YouTube video. VDownloader will quickly download Youtube clips and support many popular video formats. It also saves audio clips as MP3.

Irfanview - A light but powerful app for picture viewing and basic editing (resize, rotate, crop, etc.).

VLC - An excellent portable media player that supports many video formats and does not require 3rd-party codecs.

Notepad++ - If the old Notepad is too simplistic and Microsoft Word is too big, then Notepad++ is a perfect option to get a powerful yet portable text editing capabilities. It comes with tons of nice features, like tabbed interface, syntax highlighting, macro recording, and much more.

Abiword - Some may choose OpenOffice, but you should pick Abiword if you use Google Docs and Zoho for out-of-office chores.

Foxit PDF Reader - It can be quite annoying when using a public PC and it doesn’t have a PDF viewer installed. Foxit is a light and powerful app for opening your PDFs.

Total Commander - Total Commander is an excellent tabbed, dual-pane Explorer replacement, it also supports all kinds of archive/compressed files. That eliminates the hassle of using two more apps just to handle file extraction and syncs. It also has basic text editor and FTP client features.

PStart - It gives you quick access to all the portable apps on your flash drive, and it creates a tray icon for quick access.