By Martin Jansen, Owner of Jansen-PCINFO
Imagine going to any Windows PC with a USB drive that contains your own set of applications and then save the app generated files to the same USB drive. It’s almost like having a portable PC in your pocket.
That’s the idea behind https://portableapps.com/.
All the applications are open source or freeware and can be updated if an internet connection is available. The applications are organized by category and can be made a favorite with a right click on the menu. Favorites are listed on top of the categories.
I used an old 16GB USB 2.0 drive for my experimentation with Portable Apps and it worked great. I believe it would even be better with a USB 3.0 or higher drive – updates and application loading would be faster.
It is also possible to load the portable apps to a local drive on the PC, but that takes away the portability factor.
The last and most interesting way is to save the apps and files to cloud storage. The suggested storage is Dropbox, Google Drive and others where direct access to the storage through a file manager is available. Of course, this last method is subject to logons to these storage services and an excellent, speedy connection to the internet.
Many of the applications are open source and already have Mac and Linux counterparts, but you can run the portable apps on Linux using WINE. I wrote about WINE in this article.
Still, there is something to be said for having all your apps and app generated files in one place for easy access. The dizzying and vast list of apps is listed here for your convenience.
The only restriction I can think of for using portable apps would be in an corporate environment where Windows computers are locked down and restricted from running the Start.exe on the portable storage. Managed computers on a domain can be finitely controlled in this way, but I have seen that such strict control can impede staff productivity.
I hope you enjoyed this article about Portable Apps. Do you think you would find a use for Portable Apps in your life?