Pcdocpro: Computer On A Keychain

Computer On A Keychain

Portable storage technology has made leaps and bounds since the days of tapes and floppy disks. It was only a matter of time before the marriage of the USB port to flash memory hardware was realized. Not only are USB thumb drives tiny, but they sport gigabytes of storage and are more robust than the floppies of yesteryear; as if this weren’t enough, it is now possible to pack an entire computer system onto a USB thumb drive, allowing you to cut the shackles that bind you to your laptop.

Stroll into your favorite internet café, plug in your thumb drive, and you’ve got your own personal computer, complete with all your files, settings, and personal launch menu. Web 2.0 applications have made it easier to do a great deal of your computing online—think Google Docs and Calendar—but a thumb drive allows for the storage of any application that you can install on your home computer.

The Perfect Thumb Drive

Before anything else, you’ll need to select a good reliable thumb drive. It’ll behoove you to choose a thumb drive with a read rate of 15 megabits per second or faster; the faster your thumb drive is, the more fluid and quickly the applications that you store on your flash drive will run. Before your purchase, make sure that you’re choosing a USB 2.0 flash drive, as opposed to its much slower USB 1.x predecessor.

Software for the Hardware

Now that you’ve got the right thumb drive, it’s time to select the portable software you’d like to populate it with. The term “portable software” refers to programs that were written to run from a single folder without writing to the registry and saving files to the host computer. Basically, a portable program is completely self-contained and has everything it will ever need right inside its folder, the perfect type of program to run from a thumb drive.

Because of the nature of office suite software, unfortunately, Microsoft Word doesn’t fit into the category of “portable software”, but that doesn’t mean you’re completely out of luck if you wish to run word processors and spreadsheet programs from your thumb drive; there are a number of office suite packages that were designed to run in a portable environment.

A nice all-in-one package of various programs is Portable Apps. This collection includes a virus scanner, Firefox, Thunderbird, IM client, and much more; basically, this package contains much of what you need to get your daily computing tasks done when you’re on the go.

Software Launch Pad

OK, so you’ve got your super fast thumb drive packed with your favorite portable programs; what’s next, you ask? Well, the icing on the cake for your personalized pocket computer is an application launcher. Portable Apps comes with one right out of the box. Most launchers place an icon in the host computer’s taskbar tray; clicking this icon will pop up a menu akin to Windows’ start menu that makes it more convenient to run the programs on your thumb drive. There are a number of portable launchers to choose from, so you may want to experiment to see which one meets your needs the best.

With just a ubiquitous thumb drive and the right type of software, you’ll be able to forgo lugging around your laptop, carrying around a tiny personalized computer in your pocket or keychain instead!