Greatest People on Earth

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Portable Programs: Grab Your Meme Sticks!

 Erica Marshall of muddyboots.org , and my own handywork



 Portable programs are just that. Portable. You can take them with you on your handy-dandy usb stick, flash drive, sd card, or whatever small memory device you've got..

 In the past, in order to use almost all programs, you've had to install them to hard disks. The programs then took and rooted themselves into the host by putting part of themselves in the registry. Sometimes they would set up shop in the boot sector. Most programs would leave parts of themselves running in the background, just in case you wanted to use them at some point.

 I never really liked that. Once programs got bigger than what would fit on a single floppy disk, I chose carefully what I would allow to take up precious rom real-estate.

 With portable programs, those worries are over. Almost every kind of program you can think of can be made into a portable program. Of course huge games other massive programs are going to be excluded for now, but the future looks good for tiny files.

 I love portable programs. They allow my inner minimalist to spread out in the space of empty memory. Sure, they take longer to initialize, but once they're up and running, it's hard to tell any difference.

 Make sure if you go this route with your programs to make multiple backups. I had one sd card crap out and two usb memory sticks. You get what you pay for in those areas, for sure.

 Some software suites that allow multiple downloads to different computers might have difficulties, but I sense people have been working around these issues for quite some time.

 So now that you'll have that empty memory, what kind of neighbor will you give your lonely operating system?

46 comments:

  1. portable programs are SICK! i love putting chrome on my thumb drive :)

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  2. technology advancement can be so wonderful!

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  3. Portable programs really make lives easier. :D

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  4. Oh hell yes. Give me a thin client and a flash drive, I'll be havin fun in no time.

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  5. It's hard to wrap my brain around the fact that an entire, complicated program can be so miniscule. Pretty awesome.
    xoRobyn

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  6. I love my flash drive. It's my life lol.

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  7. Couldnt live without my flash drives.

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  8. like you said, portable programs are only good for small programs. things like uTorrent and Winrar for example.

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  9. i always have a portableapps.com usb stick with me :)

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  10. I'm trying to find a large sized GB usb drive to fill with informational books and videos, good for post-apocalyptic Earth. As long as you can get a working computer with a usb drive you won't need an internet connection, but I wonder what it will be like trying to scavenge for information off of hard disks...

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  11. I have too many usb flash drives, lol. Need less not more, thanks for the article.

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  12. Good for programs you might need anywhere you go, but I'm unlikely to need everything. This is best for utility programs like winRAR that public computers don't usually install, I think.

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  13. I have a stick that I use exclusively for portable programs, very useful thingy.

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  14. I have an external hard drive that i only use when i wanna reinstall my os

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  15. This reminded me of a commercial I saw for 'Staples.' A crusty old gym teacher tells parents that kids will need, among other things, "jump drives."
    He says, "I don't know what they are, but they'll be doin' a whole lotta jumpin'."

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  16. it's just technology making another good step

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  17. Portable programs are really useful; I have an "emergency" stick just with those. You never know...

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  18. To be honest I never knew that was available now.

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  19. Yep I have a portable at all times- Truecrypt portable ftw! +followed

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  20. If I had to use more computers, I would probably need portable apps.

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  21. Reaper is a great portable application.

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  22. I need to get some more flashdrives. always nice to have.

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  23. I'm going to have to agree that this is a good advancement.

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  24. Nice. I love using portable programs for when I go away.

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  25. Love my USB drive. 16gb, got a whole bunch of recovery stuff on there, completely bootable. It rocks!

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  26. Hmm I wonder what kind of programs I'd find the use to put on a flash drive.

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  27. Yeah portables are sweet, I've got a copy of portable photoshop, it's bonus.

    That pliers usb stick is sweet too, I'd put a linux recovery OS on it and then make cheesy jokes about 'tools'

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  28. I need both - HDD to store, USB to travel ;>

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  29. I remember you used to pay premium for 1gb sticks..now they're a dime a dozen and with portable apps...lovin' the future

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  30. i would be lost without my usb device!!!

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  31. Like to have my whole machine on a usb device.

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  32. awesome idea, i've got a ton of small programs i would like to get off my machine and on to small drive

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  33. I like the idea that you can run linux on a hard drive, thats so cool!!

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  34. Led on by heaven, and crownd with joy at last: Following!

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  35. its surprising to be able to run a program without installing it

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  36. Very interesting stuff!
    That's really a cool idea, with the Linux. Heard people did that with Chrome OS.

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