Apps to go
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.
