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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul



Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Setting up Your Portable Office

I'm not sure why, but I'm fascinated by the idea of the "portable office," where you bring no-installation-required versions of must-have applications around with you on a USB memory key and can then use any PC in the world to get work done. HDDSAVER.COM has an interesting article about doing this:
One thing you can do to make your travels easier is to bring your favorite programs with you.

To do this all the things you will need are: a USB flash drive (practically any size) and a few minutes. When you get to your destination you will simply need a Windows computer, something which can be found in almost any library, office, hotel, or internet cafe any in the world.

The process is very simple; all it requires is downloading Portable Firefox and putting the folder inside the zipped file onto your USB drive. This will give you a version of Firefox 1.5 which can be run from any Windows system with installation needed ... a cross-platform version is available as well.

Portable email is just as easy, though a lot more useful. Portable Thunderbird does the trick here.

The next item you should throw into your USB office is Portable OpenOffice. This 74MB suite will require a larger USB drive than the other two programs, but you can still fit them all on a 128MB USB drive without any problems. Portable OpenOffice is not nearly as lightweight as Portable Firefox, but it will provide users with most of the comforts of home.
To be honest, I'd never even think of relying on such a thing to get work done, but it's a great backup and certainly a heck of a lot better than nothing.
[ Posted at 8:38 AM | Permalink ]

 



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