Your Computing Life, on a USB Thumb Drive

Why carry a bulky netbook or an oversize smartphone when you can have all the comforts of your own desktop—on any PC you encounter? That's the joy of carrying everything computable on a USB thumb drive. You can put an entire bootable operating system on these tiny flash-memory devices, or just carry around a few key files. The glorious in-between is using portable applications—software that runs off a USB drive, full installation on a PC not required.

If this concept sounds familiar to Macintosh users, it should. Since the dawn of System 1.0, Mac operating systems have had self-contained software. In Windows, installing a program, especially something as complicated as an office suite, typically involves stray files that reside in several areas of a hard drive. A DLL here, a swap file there, and of course, entries to the Windows Registry. It's what makes uninstalling many Windows programs particularly difficult. Hear me, Windows! Portable apps are what programs should always have been: self-contained and easy to get rid of. Even if one does write stray files to your hard drive, the rule is that the app should remove those files when you close it and disconnect the drive—provided you disconnect properly, of course.

Remember that you have to use Hi-Speed USB 2.0—not only on the drive, but also on the port. That 480-megabit-per-second (Mbps) speed is essential. This shouldn't be much of an issue, but it could crop up if you've got some ancient USB hub laying about with USB 1.1 ports. The tenfold speed increase coming with this year is only going to make portable apps all the more worthwhile.

Portable apps aren't limited just to USB thumb drives, either. Some can work on other types of flash memory, such as SD cards, or on other USB mass storage devices—even a media player like the iPod (though not the iPod touch or the iPhone). All that matters most of the time is that Windows sees the gadget as a USB Mass Storage device.

U3: Commercial and Open-Source Portability

I requested a 32GB for testing with this story—and not just because it's sleek, spacious, and fast (as well as being a former Editors' Choice). Like all SanDisk thumb drives, this $150 unit comes with the U3 LaunchPad preinstalled.

When you plug the Cruzer Contour into a Windows system, you see two drives. One is the main space for the USB drive itself; the second is a partition for only the U3 LaunchPad and portable software (which appears, oddly, as a CD-ROM drive). My Cruzer came with no portable apps installed on the LaunchPad; it runs in the system tray, ready to pop up like a Windows Start menu but on the right-hand side of the screen.

Your job is to fill the LaunchPad with useful portable apps to take from system to system. Click the Add Programs link in the software to get to U3 Download Central, a Web site filled with portable versions of programs you've heard of (EverNote, Foxit Reader, RoboForm, Skype, Veoh Web Player) and a lot more you haven't. This was an app store long before iTunes had one. And just like iPhone apps, many for U3 are free, but not all. The selection is very big compared with that of the competition (below), but not exactly as vast as the selection of everything you can get for direct install into Windows.

For true power computing, one usually expects an office suite, and U3 Download Central has OpenOffice. As of this writing, U3's Software Central site is offering OpenOffice 2.2, not , even though it's been available since last year. U3 moves slooowly to make updates to its software library.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has yet to embrace the portability of its own software, so you can't run Microsoft Office from a U3 drive. But making MS Office portable isn't impossible (see ). —

PortableApps.com: Nothing but Free

A new version of the PortableApps.com Suite was recently released by developer John Haller. PortableApps.com Version 1.5 functions in the same way as U3: It resides on your USB thumb drive (which it renames to PortableApps.com) with an autorun program ready to launch it when you insert the drive. Unlike U3, it looks like a thumb drive in Windows Explorer; PortableApps.com doesn't take on the appearance of a CD-ROM drive.

Launch it and you'll see an icon in the system tray; click the icon and you'll get a pop-up menu reminiscent of the Windows Start menu, full of programs installed along with the PortableApps.com software.

What programs you see depends on the version you download. The "light" version has just one, AbiWord Portable. The regular version has the full OpenOffice 3.0 suite, plus the Firefox Web browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, Pidgin IM client, ClamWin antivirus tool, Sumatra PDF reader, sticky notes, games, and more—all portable. And once you've installed either version, you can add more from those listed at PortableApps.com. The only requirement for inclusion is that the program must be open source, which also means free. (That means no programs like Skype, which is free but not open source; however, Skype is on U3 and Ceedo, or you can make Skype portable for any USB drive anytime with a little hacking.)

The PortableApps.com Suite is a great way to test beta versions of Mozilla software. Firefox 3.07 comes with the suite, but you can also install the beta of Firefox 3.1 to the USB drive to give it a whirl, because Haller makes it (and the Thunderbird 3 Beta) available. The portable version won't have any impact at all on your existing installation of Firefox, either on your hard drive or on the thumb drive.

Ceedo: Making Most Apps Portable

Ceedo, at first glance, looks like a clone of U3, with its pseudo start menu and portable application capability. It powers the PowerToGo feature on USB drives from companies like Lexar, helping them compete with SanDisk and its U3 software. You can install the $39 Ceedo Personal software on any thumb drive, however. The directory of free programs you can opt to use on it is a nice mix of the excellent freebies you'd find on the others (including Firefox, OpenOffice 2.4.2, Opera, RoboForm, Skype, and Thunderbird), and some premium apps like the MyLife Organized task manager and the CoolTick stock ticker. Most of the choices, however, are free.

Ceedo Argo will install just about any application you can buy or download on your thumb drive as part of your Ceedo Personal. The company says its users have tested it with Microsoft Office, PageMaker, Quicken, even World of Warcraft, running all from the USB port. If you get Ceedo with a thumb drive, you have to buy Argo separately for $19.99; but if you buy Ceedo Personal direct, Argo is included. The company is currently working on a 3.0 version of Ceedo. —

Keep It Fast

As for performance, get the fastest USB drive you can find (and afford) if you plan to run portable apps. Look for one rated with a fast read/write speed, or at the very least one compatible with Windows ReadyBoost, a technology in Windows Vista that stores an extra cache for the OS on a USB drive to enhance system performance. You can test out USB drive speed with free software like Check Flash (click the EN at top to get the English version) or HD Speed, both of which have the added bonus of being self-contained programs that don't require installation. Maybe it's a trend.

In my testing with the SanDisk Cruzer Contour, U3 and PortableApps had their issues on older, slower systems. Tests with the HD Speed utility on both a quad-core Gateway GT5628 desktop and a single-core Lenovo ThinkPad T41 notebook put the drive's read-speed average at 24.3 megabytes per second (MBps), very close to the rating on the box (25 MBps). However, performance of portable apps on the T41 was much slower, so it's as much a function of the host PC as it is of the speed of the thumb drive. Considering that the whole point is to be mobile and to take advantage of whatever computers are available, you'd best be prepared for performance issues. There are no guarantees of finding a quad-core system at the local café, or even in your own office.

When I did pit them against each other on a quad-core, however, the two app launchers performed comparably. U3 was a little faster when it came to launching OpenOffice—but it was also loading the older OpenOffice 2.2.0, which goes to a staging area in about 8 seconds. PortableApps already supports OO 3.0.1 (and has since days after that version became available). The upside of supporting only open-source programs is that PortableApps.com moves a little faster with new product support. It loaded the individual OO Writer word-processing app in 13 seconds on the same quad-core desktop.

Keep It Secure

Sticking your USB thumb drive into lots of unknown computers is a bit risky, both for your thumb drive and for the host PC. So you need to protect your drive and the data it carries.

The PortableApps.com suite comes with ClamWin Portable antivirus ready to run on Windows. U3 doesn't have any free antivirus software on its site, but it does have trial versions of Avast! Antivirus, McAfee VirusScan USB, and TrustPort Antivirus. Optionally, you can download Avira Antivirus and install it on your USB drive, but it's a kludge as the software won't auto-update, and it writes data to the host PC's hard drive when installing.

Key to keeping data safe from snoops is encryption. Some flash drives come with hardware encryption, like the IronKey. For those that don't, TrueCrypt 6.1a is a free, open-source tool for creating a virtual encrypted disk, or encrypting an entire partition of a disk—even a USB thumb drive.

When you install TrueCrypt for the first time, the trick is to select the "Extract" method, instead of "Install." This unpacks the install files but doesn't spread them across the Windows system. Pick a spot for them on the thumb drive instead. Find the TrueCrypt.exe file and double-click it; once the executable is open, go to the Tools menu and select Traveler disk setup. Under Create travelers disk files, put in the drive letter of your USB thumb drive, check Include TrueCrypt Volume Creation Wizard, and then press Create. This puts TrueCrypt into Travelers mode when it runs on the thumb drive.

This also means that whenever you run TrueCrypt in Travelers mode on a Vista system, you're going to get a UAC permission prompt. That's because Vista has to load a new device driver every time, which of course doesn't happen if you do a full install to the hard drive.

To actually encrypt something, find the TrueCrypt Format.exe app. You'll be asked to encrypt a file container, which makes a virtual encrypted disk, or to encrypt an entire non-system partition or disk. Go with the former: You'll find full instructions online. Use that encrypted space to secure your personal documents. You'll need to mount the encrypted container after you launch TrueCrypt. Once it's open, copy files to that container. Without your password, no one will be able to get access to those files, even if you leave your drive behind in a public PC.

And trust us, you will leave it behind at some point. —

Other Portability Options and Tips

Remember FloppyOffice? It was a full office suite that was so small it could run off a single floppy disk. (Maybe I should first ask whether you remember floppy disks.) You can still find it today, updated into Tiny USB Office. The target destination is obvious. This by-definition portable suite comes with a text editor, outliner, database, spreadsheet, ZIP file compressor, FTP tool, PDF maker, e-mail program, and IM app. And it takes up only 2.5 megabytes; compare that with the 350MB required by PortableApps.com Suite with OpenOffice. That tiny size is very handy if you've got limited space on your USB thumb drive. In fact, it's a good backup on any drive.

MojoPac places a portable, virtual Windows XP desktop on the host PC when you activate it from the thumb drive. You can install your own apps to MojoPac, making just about any program portable. The downside is, the host PC must be running XP as well: It won't work with a host running Vista or anything else. Upside: It's like truly carrying a full computer with you, without having to go through the hassle of booting from your USB drive. The full MojoPac costs $29.99 after a 30-day trial.

We all know that you can make live CDs that boot a computer into a Linux distro. You can do the same without a CD and instead use a USB thumb drive. The Ubuntu Linux documentation has very specific tips on making this happen under the heading "Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting." An easier method is to use the USB-creator utility to take an Ubuntu ISO and write it to a ready-to-boot USB drive.

Third-party tools like UNetbootin can create such "Live USB" bootable thumb drives for many flavors of Linux. A couple of distros, including Portable Linux, come ready for install directly on a bootable USB devices.

Of course, it's also possible to put Windows XP on a USB drive and make it bootable—it's just complicated as hell.

For an extra layer of security, consider installing ThumbScrew. It makes a USB thumb drive read-only, so it's next to impossible for malware to get on board. You'll need to carry the software on your drive and install it fully on each new PC, then activate it from the system tray each time you want to write to the thumb drive. But if you have suspicions about the host PC, better to take the precaution.

Ejecting your USB drive properly is a must with portable applications. It isn't good for the programs or your data if you unplug the USB drive while programs are running. Windows doesn't always offer a way to see if your drive is ready to (literally) go. A tiny app called USB Disk Eject provides a display of what USB-based devices are on the system. Double-click the thumb drive in question to ensure that the drive is disconnected virtually before you disconnect physically.