How to make the most of your USB stick
Posted on June 25, 2008 at 5:29 am
A while back a feature was presented here at Online Tech Tips, which talked about the PortableApps website, and how you can use software found there to set up a USB stick with essential programs and utilities that can be run directly from the stick and be used on any PC with a USB port.
I’m going to take up where that feature left off, why am I doing this? Well simply because I followed the PortableApps route and was not completely happy with it. For a start I don’t like their launcher, the main reason I don’t like it is because it carries their branding.
I absolutely refuse to use any software on my PC which carries such blatant branding or advertising, so much so that I am still using the old version of MSN Messenger because I do not want the pushed advertising that comes with Messenger Live.
Another problem with the launcher was scalability, it can’t be resized easily, which was a real pain when running it on my ASUS EEE PC and it’s 7″ screen. So I started looking for a replacement launcher and eventually I found PStart, this is a very lightweight application, and is easily configured, I like it far better than the PortableApps launcher.
It sits in the task tray and I have set a hotkey to activate it, it even allows you to create an autorun file, so now when I pop my USB stick into the port, my launcher appears straight away, for cool.
I then took a long hard look at the PoartableApps software suite, and decided there were some gaping holes, if I was going to set up a useful system, then I needed a portable application to cover every task I need to perform in my work day.
First on the list of requirements was an RSS reader, and after several false leads, I came up with GreatNews, this feature rich and fully portable application does everything I need in a news reader, perfect.
Next I went in search of a portable utility to resize images, it annoys the hell out of me that Vista has no simple resize feature, ok we all know you can resize and email the images to yourself but that’s just ridiculous. What I came up with was Fotosizer, another fully portable application and an excellent edition to my toolset. I also found MWSnap for screen captures and ColorPic for a palette picker, this pretty much covers my daily image manipulation needs.
For downloads of all types I went and grabbed both NetLeech and uTorrent, both portable applications and both have the functions I require from a download manager and BitTorrent client respectively.
Skype was on my list of portable requirements, and a little investigation turned up a simple way to make it portable, simply copy your instillation folder to your USB stick and create a “data” sub-directory, when adding the program entry to the PStart menu simply add /datapath:”data” /removable as the command line parameters, bingo portable Skype.
And that pretty much completes the list, by adding these applications to the PortableApps suite, and switching the launcher over to PStart, I have managed to build a USB stick that has an application to cover absolutely everything I need to do on a daily basis.
I find myself using these applications more and more, even when working on my desktop PC with all of the fat applications it has installed, I still end up plugging in the USB stick and using theses simple applications all the time.
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Heh! This one is really a cool tool! I just missed to blog about it!
This looks like a cool application, I just ordered another pen drive for myself will try this out
Amazing application.Never heard or thought of this..
I have used PStart lets see what is Fotosizer all about…neways the pics shown above are quite distorted.