So I’ve actually been using Portable Apps for years now, but I never thought to share it with you guys. But as all college students know, free = good pretty much all the time. So I thought I’d share a few portable apps that have been useful to me throughout the years. All of these are free replacements for many paid versions of software that students use all of the time.
Most of these can be found at PortableApps.com
OpenOffice.org - This is an open source document/spreadsheet/presentation editor (free version of word/excel/powerpoint). While I admittedly don’t use this often (all of the computers I use have microsoft office), it would definitely be useful to any student who wasn’t ready to spend the $100+ for microsoft office. Also it is much smaller in size on the hard drive and it is faster.
Firefox Portable – This is a portable version of the ever popular Firefox browser. It runs fantastically well, and when you start adding firefox addons it becomes really awesome. I added foxmarks, and now all of my bookmarks are synced between computer, laptop, and flash drive.
Portable VLC Media Player – This is another that I can’t live without. It’s a simple media player with no frills or even an atractive interface. But what it does, it does well. And that is play pretty much every audio or video format known to man. I love this program!
Pidgin Portable – This is a super chat client. It works with AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and Jabber chat systems. You can log into multiple accounts all at once. Just great!
Filezilla Portable - This is for the techies. It’s a free ftp client software. I use it to upload everything I need to my webserver. Again free = awesome!
CCleaner Portable – a great program for getting rid of unnecessary files and clearing disk space.
ClamWin Portable – easy to use anti-virus software.
TrueCrypt – super secret encryption software to keep your data safe. You can even use pictures or songs as the password, instead of just text. Wild stuff!
Sumatra PDF - Nothing too special about this one, but its fast and free. Oh, I guess I should tell you what it is. It’s a ebook (.pdf) reader.
PortableApps Menu – (pic shown above) this is pretty much like the start menu, except it accesses all of your portable applications (and its in the bottom right, instead of the start button in the bottom left…)
