Portable Software

Portable software refers to any software that will just run without the need to be installed on a PC. Essentially a portable application can be picked up and dropped on a new PC and will continue to work as before with all current data and settings.

Here are some sites for finding and downloading free/open source portable applications:

If you are going to use portable applications, you might think of just running these on off your USB stick. The problem there is performance. The simple apps will work fine but larger apps (think OpenOffice) just don't work that well. What you're better of doing is running these on the computer. The only issue there is privacy. If you need that, then the best approach is to either sandbox your application using sandbox software like Sandboxie or to create a secure TrueCrypt partition.

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