With portable apps you have programs and tools that can be run independently from a pen drive or flash drive or any other removable drive without the need of installing any of them. These apps are very handy and highly in use by diverse professionals from all kinds of industries.
A portable app means you can leave your PC or laptop back at home or office and plug in the portable thumb drive into another PC and carry on with your work, running the application without having to leave the tool behind.
Decryption and encryption apps
Any time you are carrying documents on the go you definitely do not want any person to access them publicly. Secure flash drives also include encryption and password protection. With TrueCrypt app for instance in your flash drive, you have one a freely accessible open source program ideal for encryption.
Decryption and encryption is immediately done as the data is encrypted automatically before it has been saved, including being decrypted once it has been loaded without any intervention from a user. The app does not store decrypted data on a disk.
Portable browsers
There are a number of them. One is the portable version of Mozilla that gives you a chance to take your favorite browser wherever you are going without the need of leaving personal data behind on the PC you are using.
In fact, you are actually taking your favorite extensions and bookmark along with you. You will also find portable Safari and G-Chrome available and easy to carry around with you in your flash.
Bootable portable operating systems
To fix or diagnose a troubled machine that has refused to boot from a hard drive, you might always want to have a portable USB bootable stick with you. These apps are wonderful for knowledgeable users, tech support and system admins. Such an application is exactly what you need for instance to reset admin Windows accounts while using a number of filesystems’ Unixy utilities.
With a tool such as LinuxLive USB Creator, you can create a bootable, virtualized portable USB stick that runs on Linux. Additional virtues include the LinuxLive, VirtualBox that gives the user the chance to run LinuxLive right away on Windows devoid of the need to configure anything or installing any software on a hard drive.
Security tools
If you are about to use an untrustworthy system you definitely need some removal or detection tools with you. There are a lot of affordable and free security tools such as ClamWin, SpyBot’s Search and Destroy, My Turbo PC and Malwarebytes.
In case the PC you are about to use looks overtly suspicious, you might want to first boot via the USB drive before scanning the hard drive of the system from the applications on your flash drive.
Password management and recovery
You can also choose from the huge number of password managers to keep your password safe while using untrustworthy PCs. Password apps worth checking out include Gorilla Password Portable, KeePass and PasswordSafe among others. It is also possible you have forgotten the password for an admin or user account or the machine you are using is locked.
With a number of portable utilities already in the market, such as the free OphCrack, you can easily reset or recover your passwords. Since you will be running the program on a PC you might not have ready access, most of these apps come with bootable distros Linux for a flash drive.
