Hello Boys and Girls,

The following article, by Eric Griffith, will show you how to turn your little USB Thumb Drive into a virtual Mini PC. 

I love this stuff!!!!  (Big Smile) 

Enjoy,

Mark 

NOTE:
Hyperlinks are not live in this edition.  A link to the original article is located at the bottom of this page.

YOUR COMPUTING LIFE, ON A USB THUMB DRIVE
by Eric Griffith

You can put an entire bootable operating system on a USB flash drive or customize your own collection of apps to run on any PC, anywhere. Here’s how.

Why carry a bulky netbook or an oversize smartphone when you can have all the comforts of your own desktop—on any PC you encounter? That’s the joy of carrying everything computable on a USB thumb drive. You can put an entire bootable operating system on these tiny flash-memory devices, or just carry around a few key files. The glorious in-between is using portable applications—software that runs off a USB drive, full installation on a PC not required.

If this concept sounds familiar to Macintosh users, it should. Since the dawn of System 1.0, Mac operating systems have had self-contained software. In Windows, installing a program, especially something as complicated as an office suite, typically involves stray files that reside in several areas of a hard drive. A DLL here, a swap file there, and of course, entries to the Windows Registry. It’s what makes uninstalling many Windows programs particularly difficult. Hear me, Windows! Portable apps are what programs should always have been: self-contained and easy to get rid of. Even if one does write stray files to your hard drive, the rule is that the app should remove those files when you close it and disconnect the drive—provided you disconnect properly, of course.

Remember that you have to use Hi-Speed USB 2.0—not only on the drive, but also on the port. That 480-megabit-per-second (Mbps) speed is essential. This shouldn’t be much of an issue, but it could crop up if you’ve got some ancient USB hub laying about with USB 1.1 ports. The tenfold speed increase coming with SuperSpeed USB 3.0 this year is only going to make portable apps all the more worthwhile.

Portable apps aren’t limited just to USB thumb drives, either. Some can work on other types of flash memory, such as SD cards, or on other USB mass storage devices—even a media player like the iPod (though not the iPod touch or the iPhone). All that matters most of the time is that Windows sees the gadget as a USB Mass Storage device.

U3: Commercial and Open-Source Portability

I requested a 32GB SanDisk Cruzer Contour for testing with this story—and not just because it’s sleek, spacious, and fast (as well as being a former Editors’ Choice). Like all SanDisk thumb drives, this $150 unit comes with the U3 LaunchPad preinstalled. 
When you plug the Cruzer Contour into a Windows system, you see two drives. One is the main space for the USB drive itself; the second is a partition for only the U3 LaunchPad and portable software (which appears, oddly, as a CD-ROM drive). My Cruzer came with no portable apps installed on the LaunchPad; it runs in the system tray, ready to pop up like a Windows Start menu but on the right-hand side of the screen.

Your job is to fill the LaunchPad with useful portable apps to take from system to system. Click the Add Programs link in the software to get to U3 Download Central, a Web site filled with portable versions of programs you’ve heard of (EverNote, Foxit Reader, RoboForm, Skype, Veoh Web Player) and a lot more you haven’t. This was an app store long before iTunes had one. And just like iPhone apps, many for U3 are free, but not all. The selection is very big compared with that of the competition (below), but not exactly as vast as the selection of everything you can get for direct install into Windows.

For true power computing, one usually expects an office suite, and U3 Download Central has OpenOffice. As of this writing, U3’s Software Central site is offering OpenOffice 2.2, not version 3.0, even though it’s been available since last year. U3 moves slooowly to make updates to its software library.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has yet to embrace the portability of its own software, so you can’t run Microsoft Office from a U3 drive. But making MS Office portable isn’t impossible (see Other Portability Options).

PortableApps.com: Nothing but Free

A new version of the PortableApps.com Suite was recently released by developer John Haller. PortableApps.com Version 1.5 functions in the same way as U3: It resides on your USB thumb drive (which it renames to PortableApps.com) with an autorun program ready to launch it when you insert the drive. Unlike U3, it looks like a thumb drive in Windows Explorer; PortableApps.com doesn’t take on the appearance of a CD-ROM drive.

Launch it and you’ll see an icon in the system tray; click the icon and you’ll get a pop-up menu reminiscent of the Windows Start menu, full of programs installed along with the PortableApps.com software.

What programs you see depends on the version you download. The “light” version has just one, AbiWord Portable. The regular version has the full OpenOffice 3.0 suite, plus the Firefox Web browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, Pidgin IM client, ClamWin antivirus tool, Sumatra PDF reader, sticky notes, games, and more—all portable. And once you’ve installed either version, you can add more from those listed at PortableApps.com. The only requirement for inclusion is that the program must be open source, which also means free. (That means no programs like Skype, which is free but not open source; however, Skype is on U3 and Ceedo, or you can make Skype portable for any USB drive anytime with a little hacking.)

The PortableApps.com Suite is a great way to test beta versions of Mozilla software. Firefox 3.07 comes with the suite, but you can also install the beta of Firefox 3.1 to the USB drive to give it a whirl, because Haller makes it (and the Thunderbird 3 Beta) available. The portable version won’t have any impact at all on your existing installation of Firefox, either on your hard drive or on the thumb drive.

Ceedo: Making Most Apps Portable

Ceedo, at first glance, looks like a clone of U3, with its pseudo start menu and portable application capability. It powers the PowerToGo feature on USB drives from companies like Lexar, helping them compete with SanDisk and its U3 software. You can install the $39 Ceedo Personal software on any thumb drive, however. The directory of free programs you can opt to use on it is a nice mix of the excellent freebies you’d find on the others (including Firefox, OpenOffice 2.4.2, Opera, RoboForm, Skype, and Thunderbird), and some premium apps like the MyLife Organized task manager and the CoolTick stock ticker. Most of the choices, however, are free.

Ceedo Argo will install just about any application you can buy or download on your thumb drive as part of your Ceedo Personal. The company says its users have tested it with Microsoft Office, PageMaker, Quicken, even World of Warcraft, running all from the USB port. If you get Ceedo with a thumb drive, you have to buy Argo separately for $19.99; but if you buy Ceedo Personal direct, Argo is included. The company is currently working on a 3.0 version of Ceedo.

Keep It Fast

As for performance, get the fastest USB drive you can find (and afford) if you plan to run portable apps. Look for one rated with a fast read/write speed, or at the very least one compatible with Windows ReadyBoost, a technology in Windows Vista that stores an extra cache for the OS on a USB drive to enhance system performance. You can test out USB drive speed with free software like Check Flash (click the EN at top to get the English version) or HD Speed, both of which have the added bonus of being self-contained.

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