We’re most at home (no pun intended) when we’re working on our personal computers. We know exactly what software we have at hand – well, because we installed it ourselves – and we mostly install only those applications that we need. But on certain occasions, especially when travelling, we might have to use computers that might not be equipped with the software we’re familiar with. But fear not. Several popular programs are now available in versions that can be run straight out of pen drives – and while there exist hundreds of such portable programs, we list a few essentials…
Office suit
MS Office is a proprietary program that costs lots of money. This is probably one reason why you might not find it installed in cyber cafes. While both OpenOffice and LibreOffice are available in a portable form, we suggest LibreOffice because it is faster and boasts better features. Whether it’s a word-processor or a spreadsheet program, you’ll find them all in this suite – and, of course, LibreOffice’s support for various formats is stellar.
Browser
The portable version of Firefox is a fully functional program and if you have used the desktop version, you will feel right at home with this one. To get portable Firefox, when installing, instead of your hard drive, choose the pen drive as your install location. You can then plug out the USB stick and use it on any machine. If you want further browser options, you might also want to consider Opera or Chrome. Furthermore, if you are concerned about security on a public network, choose the XeroBank browser (xerobank.com/download/index.html). It uses the Firefox engine for web surfing but routes the data through the Tor network – a worldwide network of servers – to hide the user behind several layers of random servers to ensure anonymous surfing.
Movie player
When it comes to portable media players, consider KMPlayer or Media Player Classic. Both look similar to the old Windows Media Player, and are considered to be the best programs to play video files on a PC. While you can’t go wrong with either, we suggest the latter because we have never come across an instance when it could not handle any video file.
Zip program
WinRAR and WinZip, the most popular compression programs, are commercial applications. Both cost money and, as a result, are rarely found on public computers. But Rar or Zip files are also very common and chances are you might need to compress or uncompress files when you’re away from home. For this we suggest 7Zip – a powerful and versatile open source alternative. Not only will this software allow you extract zipped files, but will also help you create password-protected compressed archives.
Picture viewer/ basic editor
You are vacationing in Goa and want to send a few pictures to your friends after a few basic edits. But the hotel where you are staying doesn’t have Photoshop installed on its computers. Well, consider Gimp or IrfanView, both of which can be run from a USB stick. But our choice here is Xn-View. It’s simple, supports a huge number of file formats (more than 400) as well as comes with basic editing options such as correcting brightness, cropping, rotate, and so on.
Instant messenger
There was a time when instant messengers were huge. But nowadays, with inbuilt chats in email and social networking web sites, they have fallen in popularity. Yet, some may have a use for portable instant messenger that can allow them to keep in touch with friends on Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and so on. Pidgin gets our vote here. It’s a multi-platform portable chat client. Best feature, as far as portability is concerned, is its support an encryption plug-in (Pidgin-Encryption 3.1) that allows its users to chat securely, without any fear of eavesdropping.
(All apps in this article can be downloaded from either www.portableapps.com or www.pendriveapps.com)
(Javed Anwer 11
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