Portable Apps
With vast memory sticks now available, it is easy (and common) to carry your entire “working data” with you. OK, maybe not everyone; my working directory is about 12Gb, so I tend to use a notebook hard drive connected via USB2.0 (useful because it’s bus powered as well). However what do you do about the software to actually “work” with?? Well a variety of vendors now produce software specifically designed to work off memory sticks/removable hard drives. An excellent first port of call is naturally enough http://portableapps.com/. You can find here a nice array of open source products “tweaked” for portable use. This includes the immensely useful Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice amongst others. Other useful bits of software in my “armory” include Trillian Anywhere, SmartFTP and Ritlabs Voyager. There really is no excuse not to be able to be totally portable.