OK this will be a brief post on how to get started with portable applications, explain how they work, and what you can do to get them running.

Now the first task is to download your portable applications. Most of the portable software out there is actually freeware and 100% legal. Now if you use freeware, (these are things such as Firefox, Thunderbird), you’ll be more than happy to know these are available in portable versions, now what this means to you is that from now on, you can carry your browser around with you, and so anywhere in the world have all your bookmarks, tool bars and whatever add-ons you like to use. With Thunderbird, you will always have your emails with you, all your templates and so on.

If you already know what you are looking for, just go to your search engine, type in the name of the software you are looking for and add portable to the end of it, eg “firefox portable” without the quotes, (click on the link to perform the search), will allow you to find the portable version of firefox.

If you don’t know what you are looking for, you can always just type in “portable software” or “portable apps“, without the quotes, and get a whole range of portable software sites. One that I use, and this is purely personal preference, is portableapps.com. This site has an entire range of portable applications and also has an attractive looking suite, (shown above), that runs them all from your taskbar. I will get back to this later.

Now from here you can download the application, run the installer and you are up and running with a portable version of your application. Now there are heaps of cool migration tools you can use to get your firefox looking and running the same, however this is of course depending on how many add-ons you have and what you want it to do. There is quite a few cool pieces of software out there, so I would recommend it for everyone to go and check it out. I do a lot of repairs on computers, and I worship portable software for allowing me to have every tool I need on my usb.

Back to the portableapps.com suite, now I know this isn’t for everyone, a lot of people don’t need any more taskbar clutter, and honestly if you aren’t interested in that it is fine. But I find it quite useful as it allows me to have access to all my software from one place. Installing new applications for the suite is painless, just download, (however for it to work well with the suite, it must be in the paf format, and have an extension that looks like .paf.exe), click Options - Add a New App - Install and then select the Portable .paf.exe file you just downloaded. The other bonus of the suite is it comes with some of the most popular applications already installed, so you are usually ready to go, straight off the bat. If you need any more information feel free to ask in here, or email me, but there is heaps of information on the site, and it is pretty straight forward.
I will talk further about more of the portable applications and each of their features in the future, if anyone has any more portable application sites worth a mention, please do comment.