This changes everything

I, like most people now days, have a USB drive that I carry with me. I got mine a few years ago and like all cutting edge users, paid a lot for what is now a piece of crap. I’ve been using a 128mb UBS drive, and while its fine for storing simple things, was leaving me feel inadequate and wasn’t able to do the cool stuff I wanted to do.

I went to Micro Center (best computer store in the Twin Cities) and got me a 2gb USB drive from Corsair. Its got rubber armor and its water resistant, and acording to Maximum PC, is the best USB drive available.

What do you do with 2gb of memory that you can carry with you all the time? You install portable versions of the applications you use all the time.

I am writing this post off of a portable version of Firefox that is on my USB drive. I also have versions of Thunderbird, Abiword, and OpenOffice running. Basically, all the core applications I use can now run off of my USB drive so they are always with me and my settings never change. All of the applications I have installed, plus all the stuff from my other USB drive, are only taking up about 17% of the 2gb drive. Nice.

If I was really adventureous, I could even run an OS off of the USB drive.

If you want to play around with some portable apps, go to PortableApps.com.

Note: you can only install open source applications as of now.

Having this ability is really, really nice. This is one of those things that really changes how you use a computer. Its that big of a deal.