Life In USB Stick

There is lot of discussion on on-demand computing and is an urgent need for business sector. However, the small business can't really expect to buy a laptop for their employees.

On-demand computing

When we would sit in front of any PC, anywhere, and with the digital equivalent of having all the applications and data at beck and call.

Many people carry their data around on a USB stick - presentations, documents, spreadsheets, you name it - why not carry the programs too! Portable applications are built for the sole purpose of being run off a USB stick - no installation, no writing settings to anything other than its own folder, and best of all, nearly all of them are free.

The Demands

Finding the best portable application for your needs is all about balancing size and features. Your first consideration is that the application should not write any settings to the host computer - you don't really want to leave your mark anywhere, do you? The next priority is size - the need is several small programs than one that hogs all the space. After all, even 512 MB USB drives can get full alarmingly quickly, and the more room is their for data, the better it is. Smaller applications have fewer features, but few of us use all the bells and whistles in most of the software.

Before proceeding, remember that all the applications need to be crammed into 200 MB of space - the remaining 300-odd should be kept free for data. Small size is a priority, but as far as possible, any compromise on features will not be there.

The office Suite

Portable OpenOffice.org is the choice right from its excellent support for all common MS Office formats to its MS Office-like interface, however, it weighs a lot (144 MB) taking up a huge chunk of the limit. If only Word processor is required, then AbiWord can be used which takes up only 15 MB of space.

The E-mail Client

On one hand, there is i.Scribe, a small seemingly simple e-mail client that fills up only 1 MB of space. It even comes with its own Bayesian spam filter, and is extremely light on system resources.

At the other end of the spectrum is Portable Thunderbird, which brings to the USB all the features of Mozilla Thunderbird - e-mail, internal support for RSS feeds, a spam filter and a spell checker. On the flip side, it occupies 9 MB.

The Anti-Virus

Now, be safe in assuming that USB drive is being connected to a clean PC with carrying an anti-virus with you. ClamWin is a free, open source, 18 MB antivirus that comes from the ClamAV team, who have been developing the Clam anti-virus engine since the days of DOS. To have ClamWin on USB, the software must be installed on a PC and follow the manual to set it up for USB drives. Remember, it isn't real-time or on-access scanner, so the program must be started manually and choose the file(s) to be scanned.

The PIM

For busy individuals who need to keep track of their tasks and schedules, EssentialPIM is very useful Personal Information Manager (PIM), which looks a little like Outlook's PIM side. You can use it to create to-do listss, schedule meeting and appointments, manage contacts, and leave little notes to yourself.

The Browser

There are only three browsers worth mentioning - Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Unfortunately, Opera is not portable yet.

For IE users, Crazy Browser is available, a 500 KB browser that seams to be a head mix of all three - it uses the IE engine, but also brings in some cool features from another two, like tabbed browsing, plug-ins and mouse gestures.

The same open source community that's responsible for Portable OpenOffice.org and Portable Thunderbird also gives us Portable Firefox, which is just that - a fully functional USB version of the Firefox browser, including support for installing the insanely popular Firefox extensions, but at 17 MB, you are going to be crunched for space.

The Media Player

Work or play chances are that you can't escape without encountering a sound or video clip that needs viewing. Since the presence of codecs on the host can't be guaranteed, two such players exist which bundle the codecs alongwith.

VideoLan VLC Player which can play nearly any audio and video file in existence and doesn't require any codecs to be pre-installed. It's tad costly at nearly 25 MB though.

MPlayer is lot lighter at 7 MB and ofcourse, it too doesn't any codecs to be installed on the PC.

The Image Viewer

IrfanView supports a huge number of image formats, is light on system resources, easy to use and can even convert images to different formats with some good compression ratios

The PDF Reader

While Adobe Reader is the de facto for reading PDF documents, but it is bulky and a resource hog. Overcoming both these nags is Foxit PDF Reader. It occupies only 2 MB of space.

The Start Menu

PStart is a program that sits in the system tray and gives customized menu that lets to choose which application is required to run. It even hunts down executable files on the drive, so that manual entries are not required. Once all the applications are in place, just select scan for executables function to create portable start menu.

Making drive autorun

If the host is running Windows XP and SP2, then you can even make the USB stick autorun by specifying an autorun.inf file. Just follow the listed steps (an example of PStart menu is shown):

1. Open notepad and type in the following text*[autorun]**open=Pstart.exe* (This is the application that you want to run)*action=Open the Start Menu* (This is the description of the action performed)*icon=Pstart.exe* (This is the icon which will be displayed in autorun menu)2. Save the file as *autorun.inf* in the root of USB drive.3. Don't forget to remove asterik signs from the text and delete all the text in paranthesis.

Making Stick Bootable

If you really want the freedom from host's OS, you can keep a copy of DSL (Damn Small Linux) OS in stick which is just 50 MB. It does comes with FluxBox Window Manager. However, on the hardware front, a bootable USB stick is required and the motherboard of the host PC must support booting from a USB device.

Wow... I knew you could make a usb drive bootable, but that is like putting a whole os on a tiny drive, you can pretty much take your computer around with you.As you said this will be great in buisinesses and with drive spaces increasing it makes more sence to do this.The only real downside is that you need a computer to use it with, so it really isn't that on demand if your out somewhere.I might try this when i get a bigger flash drive, sounds cool-HellFire

Yes, it really is great to know that all this can be done with USB drive. What is more being added here is that some paid software vendors are also coming up with the portable versions of the respective software and of course, not free this time too!Wanted ever to use Nero for burning CD/DVD at the host and chances are that host doesn't have it installed. Never mind, just get a copy of Portable Nero and you're done! However, before using it, the first time you'll run, it asks for registration information and saves into the installation forlder. Once done with registration, the Nero works like you have installed it onto host system. Ofcourse, then, the host system must have CD/DVD writer attached to it!

Wow, the information you posted is pretty informative. All this time Ive been using my usb drive for storage purposes only. I never it had other features as you have listed. With the information you provided me I might look into trying out the other features that a usb drive offers....

Yea, those portable APPS are really neat stuff, Im using them for about half a year now, and everywhere I go, I carry my copy of FireFox with me :PBut I've found even a PortablePhotoshop but it's not legal..

Wow, if you can make USBs bootable, you could carry whole systems with you. Looks like I'm going to buy a 80GB external harddisk

Again, another very nice read. I have a USB stick myself although even if I wanted to install DSL on it, the network I work in would alert the admins even before I'd get to say gee weez three times.This is the start, it wouldn't be long we'd have portions of our bodies as storage devices that is upgradeable.

I think, one option could be the use of a mini-CD for boot & storage of S.O. and then the USB drive for all data and applications.

Well, the options are always unlimited. The basic idea is being to know them all and choose the best among them according to the situation or need of hour.

Yea for DamnSmallLinux!

Use it at home as my main OS on one of my systems... very reliable and portable. 50mb is not bad for an OS, you know?

If you're reading this and you've never tried DSL, what are you waiting for?
Download Here!

Hahahaha wow, that's awesome. A 50mb operating system 'DamnSmallLinux'... well, to tell you the truth, I don't really need it. Oh by the way, have you seen Windows Vista? It's something like 2~3 gigabytes... It's crazy! If you go to Microsoft's home page and look up their Beta download section, they let you download it - or deliver a DVD containing the Windows Vista operation system to your house for a fee.Well, you can put that into SOME USB drives but it will be kind of costly. But anyway, why not just carry around a laptop? I mean, they are creating really thin and lightweight laptops and notebooks nowadays, aren't they? But yeah, they cost a lot too. And fragile as well.But wow... USB sticks/drives are becoming the rage now. They're basing technology off of it... software and firmware, etc etc. It's so interesting how USB is a huge field... haha and talk about storage. They came up with 750gb hard drives! Good grief!

Wow, programs inside flash drives are pretty amazing. I thought of installing programs to my Card Reader (1GB SD Card) but never tried it because I thought it would need to use registry keys. I'm hoping they would be able to hold Flash and Photoshop in a Card and that's about all I'll need. Cool topic, worth taking my time to try it out.

Personally I use <a href="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; for this. Ok, it needs to be installed on your PC upfront, but it always works, without annoying popups... My laptop doesn't support booting from an USB stick anyway...-Anke

I failed installing dsl 3.2 on my v-gen 2GB flashdisk.... Maybe I need to download newer version.I love the idea... and as soon as installing OS (especially the free OS) on a flashdisk is popular, maybe paid OS's companies will sell flashdisks with built in OS.A year ago I bought 2GB flashdisk, and this morning I saw 4GB flashdisk on newspaper, maybe next year I will see 80GB flashdisk (not external harddisk).