Cool Things to do With a USB Drive

We all have more USB drives than we care to think about and most of the time we pick them up at conferences or expos and forget about them in our pockets. Surely there has to be something better to do with them than just keep the mundane powerpoint presentation that was preloaded onto it. Luckily, there is. There are a lot of things you can do with extra USB drives. While decorating them like a product of childhood, like some companies have, is a viable option, it doesn’t change the functionality of the drive. Today we’re going to take a look at two great tips to get make use of that portable stick that you carry around all day.

If you haven’t yet heard of a website called portableapps.com, you may be living in the dark or don’t use the internet a whole lot. Portable Apps has been around for quite some time and the entire website is built around the concept of redesigning typical applications to boot from a USB drive. That means that when you go over to to your friends house and for whatever reason they don’t have your favorite web browser or instant messenger client installed, along with all of your personal data that goes on those programs, you can pop your USB drive into their computer and have it be like you were sitting at your desk at home. The idea is genius.

To get portable apps to work on your USB drive is ridiculously easy. Over at their website, portableapps.com, you’ll find installer packages preloaded with applications they think you’ll want. It doesn’t take much extra effort to add other programs to the mix, but they’ve gone ahead and found a whole list of applications they think would be cool for you to have. Once you’ve downloaded the installer with a suitable list of pre-selected programs, you simply run it. The installer will ask you where you want to install to, at which point you’ll point it to the root directory of your USB drive, and in a few minutes, everything will be installed. It’s relatively simple to do.
To add more applications to the USB drive, all you have to do is browse their website for something you’re interested in having, and download it. Once you’ve got the file on your computer, navigate to your USB’s file listing and create a folder with the name of the application. Sound confusing? Say you have a program called Juice.exe that you want to add. Find your way into your USB drive, open the folder called “Portable Apps,” make a new folder within that called “Juice,” and drag and drop juice.exe into that new folder. When you refresh your drive, the app will be installed and ready to go.
Before I forget, I said at the beginning that we were going to cover two different uses for a USB drive. The other thing you could do is backup your important documents to it. But, why would you do something boring like that when you could have portable apps in your pocket?