What's on your flash drive?

[CWuestefeld]

I've been putting together a flash drive with enough software installed to let me be useful on most any Windows PC. I've found a good deal of useful portable apps, and I wonder if anybody can add to the list. I started out with the 1GB edition of winPenPack, and then found these other things:

SoftMaker Office 2008	67MB	I like this much better than the OpenOffice that comes with winPenPack, so I deleted that (freeing up a ton of space) and put this in its stead. List price $80, but you can find it for much cheaper.
UltraExplorer	6MB + plugins	On my desktop I use DOpus, but don't have the portable license. After a bit of searching, this seems to be the best free portable explorer for a DOpus lover. Takes TotalCommander plugins for its file viewer, too.
Diagram Designer	<1MB (wow)	I really don't like the open-source Dia (portable here). Diagram Designer offers really good diagramming without the bells-and-whistles that I've never used anyway, for an incredibly small space premium.
Python development environment	92MB total	Movable Python - A python runtime that's portable. Not free, but at 5GBP it's close enough for me. SPE (Stani's Python Editor), a pretty decent Python IDE in under 6MB
Games		Jooleem Portable - a marble matching game LBreakout2 Portable Sudoku Portable
IrfanView	10MB with plugins	Image viewer
SysInternals ProcessExplorer	3.5MB	Monitor what the system's doing
Unknown Devices	<1MB	Find out what the mystery devices in your computer are.
TestDisk	<3MB	Disk partition recovery

[4wd]

Lupo Pensuite - is on one of my 2GB flash drives, uses ~300MB.

System Rescue CD - is on another bootable 2GB, also includes an (mainly) unattended XP installation, WinBuilder LiveXP, Acronis Recovery ISO, Hitachi Feature Tool ISO, various bootable floppy images (eg. Ranish Partition Manager, Darik's Boot and Nuke, DOS, etc, etc), PuppyLinux, Damn Small Linux, DOS apps, Windows Apps and a lot more.  All, (well mostly), selected by boot menu, mixture of GRUB4DOS and syslinux.

An Imation Atom 2GB stores encrypted stuff in a secure partition.

And another 2GB is just for junk 

What can I say.....they were cheap 

[ewemoa]

I'm not using a flash drive, but I've started a separate partition (actually a file being treated as a drive via ImDisk) for portable apps -- the idea here is that my inevitable OS-reinstall can be made much less time-consuming because in theory, I shouldn't have to muck w/ at least the partition with the portable apps (as a bonus, I can have multiple OS installations use the same portable apps).

I started with the just-mentioned Lupo Pensuite and have been carving away things from its Apps directory that I don't use and have been adding updates and new apps to its Plus directory.

The file-being-treated-as-an-image is about 2GB in size so I could move the content to a flash drive at some point -- my current usage comes in at around 1.7GB and WindirStat (portable of course!) tells me that the big users of space are:

• Chrome - about 500MB (> 400MB is in a Data folder)
• OpenOfficePortable - about 250MB
• JDK - about 160MB
• emacs - about 130MB
• GnuCash - about 100MB
• Firefox - about 70MB

As to what I've found useful [1], that would be (apart from what's mentioned above) [2]:

• 7-zip
• ASuite
• AutoHotkey
• CCleaner
• DcUpdater
• DirSyncPro
• Eraser
• FileZilla
• Find and Run Robot (and some of its plugins)
• Freemind (though I modified its startup batch file -- their FAQ gives some tips)
• GIMP
• Icons From File
• ImgBurn
• JFileSync (though I modified its startup batch file)
• Nirsoft Utilities (as in, many things from there)
• Pidgin
• ProcessTamer
• PSPad
• RecentRun
• ReNamer
• ResizeEnable
• ScreenshotCaptor
• SpeedCrunch
• Sysinternals Suite
• TapTap Hotkey Extender
• TaskSwitch XP
• The Regex Coach
• TicToc Title
• Universal Extractor
• Virtuawin
• VLC

On a side note, I'm hoping some of the up-and-coming file association managing tools will come out of development states (and get tested) and I hope to come across some good app/system to manage keeping apps up-to-date (looks like I should take a look at: FreewareUpdater).


[1] I made separate categories in ASuite for things that I'm pretty sure I'll be using (based on recent experience or gut feeling), things I'm trying, things that have problems, etc. -- what I mentioned here is from what I'm sure I'll be using.

[2] Some of these are specific portable versions and some just worked as is

[Adrian]

Hello CWuestefeld,

You mentioned that you can buy Softmaker Office for a much cheaper price. Could you please let us know where and for how much?

I've just discovered Softmaker -- it loads really fast and everything about it is great.

Many thanks,
Adrian.

[Hirudin]

Practically nothing...   

• Keepass
• symbols.txt <- a txt file that has a lot of symbols (like ÄÃÂÁÀÅäãâáàåª)

Total size: 1.26MB
Free space: 3.73GB

[stewcam]

7-zip
archivarius
autohotkey
axcrypt
beyond compare
calendarscope
charprobe
clipmate
csved
dbf viewer pro
dida html editor
emeditor      
evernote
find + run robot
fast explorer
faststone capture
faststone viewer
filebox extender
filelocator pro
firefox portable
flash renamer
flashfxp
fly help
form letter machine
free download manager
greatnews
irfanview
iyf
linkstash
listpro
local website archive
mynoteskeeper
nexusfont
notetab pro
notezilla
pagefour
pdfxchange viewer
pidgin
pop peeper
portable start menu
pspad
qlock
roboform
super flexible file synchronizer
softmaker office 2008
starter
the bat private disk
the bat voyager
visual dialog script
visual site designer   
vlc media player
vopt
website watcher
wordtabs
wordweb
xyplorer
zulupad

[tomos]

... can buy Softmaker Office for a much cheaper price. Could you please let us know where and for how much?

I've just discovered Softmaker -- it loads really fast and everything about it is great.

-Adrian (December 02, 2008, 05:03 PM)

it's sold as Ashampoo Office as well - they sell it cheaper - doesnt have scripting (which I know nothing about so may be describing incorrectly) but otherwise the same I believe.

They have occasional special offers which usually get posted here - or they prob have a newsletter /they do send you lots of mail once you sign up

[Ehtyar]

Haha ewemoa, I could almost copy your list verbatim. Here are a few of mine missing from your list:

• InfraRecorder (instead of ImgBurn)
• Perl
• Notepad++
• XMPlay/Winamp
• Process Explorer
• PeaZip
• Sunbird
• SIW
• Autoruns
• FileZilla
• FDM
• KiTTY/Putty
• wget
• Windows Privacy Tray
• SumatraPDF
• Code::Blocks
• PellesC
• SharpDevelop
• OllyDbg
• HxD
• SVN
• MinGW
• ChatZilla
• Thunderbird w/ Lightning
• Apache/MySQL

OK so i got a little carried away, so sue me

Ehtyar.

[Curt]

I've been putting together a flash drive ...

-CWuestefeld (November 07, 2008, 04:59 PM)

- would that be "flash drive" as in "USB stick", or as in "USB Hard Drive"?? Well, the stick, I guess. So my answer is "license keys.eml", "Receipts.eml" (".eml" being Thunderbird's format for emails), and a few purchased hard-to-get or impossible-to-replace installation files. If the answer was the portable USB hard drive, my answer would be "C:\Curt" ;-) If it didn't have to be all that portable, my answer is C:\*

[chrisa52]

Free versions of Softmaker 2006 can be found here.

[ewemoa]

LOL.

In the time since my post, I have come to use more or am currently trying out:

• Notepad++
• SIW
• FileZilla
• FDM
• SumatraPDF
• Code::Blocks
• MinGW

I used to use, but no longer do (nothing against the programs, just no occasion to use these days):

• Perl
• PuTTY
• wget
• Windows Privacy Tray
• SharpDevelop
• SVN - though I'm trying RapidSVN
• Apache/MySQL

Didn't know about some of the others -- thanks for sharing