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Ages after everyone else has one I’ve finally got round to getting a USB Stick. The Corsair 2GB Flash Voyager is a 2GB stick that recently got the PC Pro award for USB sticks. At £82 I thought that was pretty good value. First step was to split the stick into two 1Gb drives. One drive will have a backup of my XP files – mail, pictures, files, passwords, pdf’s of manuals – that sort of thing. This is a protected drive and also the backup file is protected too – just in case it falls into the wrong hands. The second drive contains some handy apps that will work on any machine without installing and some essential utils to fix a pc. They are:

• Portable Firefox – run Firefox without leaving a trail on the host pc.
• Portable Thunderbird – get my e-mail no matter where I am
• Miranda IM – all my chatting needs met with this package
• Filezilla – portable FTP package
• Tight VNC – both server and client for remote working
• Putty – free telnet client
• Editpad Lite – small but useful text editor
• PSPad – more feature rich text editor
• IrfanView – my favourite light weight graphics editor
• XN View – multimedia viewer that can read a lot of formats
• System Information for Windows – great program that reveals a lot of information on your or someone else’s PC
• Codestuff Starter – shows all processes and apps that are launched at Windows start-up
• Process Explorer – shows a lot more about the currently running processes than task manager
• Elcomsoft Password Recovery Suite – Just in case I forget a password
• AVG – latest copy of free edition of this great anti-virus software
• Spyware Doctor – best at scanning and removing spyware
• Zonealarm – firewall that’s better than the XP default
• WinRAR – open up all kinds of archives
• Genie Backup Manager – great backup software

That’s it for the moment. I’m sure there’s a few more tools that would be handy to carry around but that will do for now – if you think there’s anything else worth adding let me know.