Portable Apps Suite review

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I move from computer to computer a great deal. More often than not, the computer I’m at doesn’t always have all the software I might need. It’s not always possible to just go and install anything I fancy on any machine I happen to use and this is where Portable Apps comes to the rescue.

Portable Apps Suite is effectively a wrapper for a number of very useful applications that can be installed on a USB pen drive (or any USB storage device, for that matter). To fire it up, simply double-click the “StartPortableApps.exe” on your USB device and you’re greeted with a nice little menu, similar to the Windows Start Menu, as can be seen on the screenshot below.

There are currently three versions of the Portable Apps Suite available for download. They only really differ in the amount of pre-installed applications they contain. Here are the various configurations:

• PortableApps Suite (Standard Edition): ClamWin Portable (antivirus), Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition (web browser), Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable (puzzle game), Mozilla Sunbird - Portable Edition (calendar/task manager) and Mozilla Thunderbird - Portable Edition (email client) and runs comfortably from a 512MB drive.
• PortableApps Suite (Lite Edition): Uses AbiWord Portable (word processor) instead of OpenOffice.org Portable and runs comfortably from a 256MB drive.
• PortableApps Suite (Base Edition): If you’d like to pick and choose exactly which apps to include, you can try Portable Apps Suite (Base Edition). This is a stripped down package with just the PortableApps Menu, PortableApps Backup utility and custom folders, icons and autorun. It’s less than 1MB installed, so it’s a great option for smaller drives.

My base download was the Standard Edition, to which I’ve added FileZilla, Nvu Portable, KeyPass and one or two others.

The usefulness of this application cannot be stressed enough. I don’t find many things more frustrating than when I need to go and change something on a computer I don’t normally have access to, only to find that my preferred software is not available. Now it’s simply a matter of popping in my pen drive and selecting the desired application. Nothing could be simpler.

To download any new applications, you simply download the executable, then select “Install a new app” from the Suite’s menu and select the new application. To “uninstall” an application, you only need delete the directory from your pen drive. If only all application installation/uninstallations were this simple.