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Portable USB Sofftware : A Melange

From Méprisant

My intention was to list all the free USB software I could find. I realized that was insane. I am now going to restrict this list to the software that I actively use OR those that I have heard of. The software listed below are all free (except Pass2Go).

Email :
Portable Thunderbird 1.5 RC1 with Enigmail and GPG
Portable Thunderbird 1.0.7
JBMail 3.2 : From the website "JBMail is a compact and portable secure e-mail client. The software has been designed for simplicity, security and "online mailbox access" meaning that mail is manipulated remotely and NOT stored locally. JBMail supports POP3, SMTP, SSL / TLS and all essential mail client features - but it is not "just another" mail client." Screenshots are on the linked page.

Mobility Email : This is built around the Portable Thunderbird code by John Haller (of Portable Firefox etc. fame) . It includes extensions to access Hotmail, Yahoo!, Lycos and MailDotCom. It also includes OpenPGP encryption and signing.

Instant Messaging :
GAIM (using gaim-portable.exe).
Miranda : Miranda is a multi-protocol instant messenger client. It supports AOL, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo and some. It's plugin architecture extends this to practically every known protocol, including Skype.
Trillian Anywhere has details on how to make Trillian portable. I presume everyone knows what Trillian is.
mICQ : I am including this for the sake of completeness. mICQ is a text-mode ICQ client.

RSS :
Portable Thunderbird 1.0.7 (and it's derivatives).
Greatnews claims to be "The Intelligent RSS Reader". I don't know why it is intelligent, but it is quite good. I've been using the FeedDemon trial for a while now, but GreatNews is free, and does everything FeedDemon can do....Besides, GreatNews is portable.

Browsers :
Portable Firefox
Portable Opera : is a Opera modified to run on a USB drive. One needs to manually modify the installation. I got it to work, but frankly, I prefer Firefox.
Lynx is a text browser and the first browser I ever used. It's very fast and has never crashed on me.
Crazy Browser uses the IE engine. It's similar to Avant Browser or Maxthon in usability / features. It can be installed on a USB drive. It requires IE 5+ to be installed on the host machine.
TorPark is a combination of Firefox and Tor, optimized to run from a USB drive.

Password Managers :
KeePass Password Safe : Keepass is an open-source password manager. I had posted about it earlier here. The .zip version has to be downloaded for use on an USB drive.
Pass2Go (not free): Pass2Go is a password manager from the guys who make Roboform. I did use this for a while, and I did like it, but it is not free. It allows one to save only 10 logins after the 30 day trial. I use Keepass now.

Encryption :
TrueCrypt : TrueCrypt is probably the best disk encryption program around (including shareware / commercial programs). The portability is the icing on the cake. There is a tutorial for securing a USB drive using TrueCrypt. Note: TrueCrypt 4.0 was just released with quite a few changes / improvements
CyberShredder : CyberShredder is a file wiping utility, along the lines of Eraser. It does not have to be installed though. I do not use this, because my USB disk volume is already encrypted using TrueCrypt.
Remora USB Disk Guard / File Guard : I'm mentioning these two programs together, because they do essentially the same thing. Neither encrypts the entire disk. USB File Guard encrypts / decrypts (optionally with compression) files. USB Disk Guard does the same to folders. Neither program encrypts the file / folder name. I don't know what algorithm is used for the encryption. The website only mentions that it is 128 bit.

Office :
Portable Open Office is really the only option for an Office Suite.
Portable Sunbird is well, Sunbird for a USB drive...a calendar application for the uninitiated. Essential PIM is equivalent to the Contacts Manager and Calendar in Outlook.
Abiword is a relatively full featured open source word processor.
Foxit PDF Reader, well , opens PDF files. It's fast and free.

Antivirus and Spyware : NOTE : I personally think don't think this category should exist. The entire point of using portable software is to perform certain tasks on machines that do not have the software to perform these tasks, like in an internet cafe. If I wanted to disinfect an infected machine, I would run either an online virus scanner or boot the machine from antivirus software cd. That being said, the list continues..
Antivir Personal Edition Classic : While this can be installed on an USB drive, it does add items to the registry of the host machine. AntiVir Personal Edition Classic is the only full fledged scanner ( ie. can detect and remove most viruses (virii?) in the wild).
McAffee AVERT Stinger is not really an Antivirus program. It removes certain threats only. It cannot substitute for an Antivirus program.
avast! Virus Cleaner is another program along the lines of McAffee AVERT Stinger. It targets certain threats. Certain options are unavailable unless one has administrator previledges. Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition : This is the only dedicated anti-spyware program I know that will run off a USB drive. It can be installed directly onto the USB drive (in it's own folder).

Audio and Video :
Audio follows :
CoolPlayer was the first small mp3 player. It supports skins, winamp plugins. The plugins go directly into the CoolPlayer directory. It sounds great too.
1by1 is a very small mp3 / mp2 player. It plays all recognized music files in a directory . Features include (from the website) : Directory Player (needs no playlists) · Extensive file navigation · Full resume play (remembers last track and position) · ACM (mp3) and mpglib (mp3/mp2) support · Winamp input plugin support · Audio dynamics and stereo enhancer · Gapless/track mixing · Directory finder (plays whole drives) · Cue sheet support · Playlist support · Favorites
XMPlay is a full featured audio player. It supports OGG, MP3, MP2, MP, WMA, AudioCD, XM and most playlist formats. It supports skins too.
CDex rips CDs and encodes them in a variety of formats. It can connect to freedb.org to get CD information.
and now video follows :
Media Player Classic is complete replacement for the Windows Media Player. It supports every video format that I know of and many more (through codecs). It includes playlist support and hotkeys. To use on a USB drive, download the .zip file and unzip on the USB drive.
VLC Media Player : From Wikipedia, "VLC media player (initially VideoLAN Client) is a media player from the VideoLAN project. It supports many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. It employs the libavcodec codec library from the FFmpeg project to handle many of the formats it supports, and uses the libdvdcss DVD decryption library to handle playback of encrypted DVDs."

Graphics:
IrfanView Everyone should know this one.
XnView is an alternate to IrfanView and was my default image viewer before the days of Picasa. It has capabilities similar to IrfanView.

FTP:
Filezilla is one of the best FTP clients, portable or not. When installing, one is given an option on where to store settings (registry or the Filezilla directory ). It's also open source.
i.Ftp is no match for Filezilla, but it's really small and gets the job done. It's open source too.

Other Internet Software :
HTTrack is a website copier. NVU is the best free, open source web authoring system available. Portable NVU is NVU modified to run on a portable drive.
µTorrent is the smallest Bittorent client around. It's interface is (somewhat) similar to Azureus. It allows simultaneous downloads, bandwith management, resuming transfers, UPnP support and is only 98 kb.
portaPUTTY is a hacked version of the excellent open source SSH client PUTTY
TightVNC is an open source VNC client. This version does not need to be installed.

Disc Burning Tools:
SilentNight Micro CD Burner : I'm getting bored, so this is a copy-paste from the website : SilentNight Micro CD Burner version 4 is a handy little tool that is able to burn CD/DVD/ISO and AUDIO formats. Nothing really special by that, as there are lots of other products that does the same out there. Still this burner stands out of the crowd in a couple of ways. 1. This burner does NOT need any installation. 2. It is one single executable file, no dll`s or anything else needed. 3. It don'windowst even need windows aspi layer, as it has its own inbuilt. 4. The complete size of the program is just above 1 mb. 5. You can even run the program directly from a CD/DVD or a USBKEY. 6. It is freeware, but it can/should be registered for further improvements.
Burrn : Burrrn is a little tool for creating audio CDs with CD-Text from various audio files. Supported formats are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets. Burrrn can read all types of tags from all these formats. Burrrn uses cdrdao.exe for burning. (also a copy-paste from the website)
BurnCDCC : This burns ISO files to a CD/DVD

Other Programs
PStart is an application launcher. While PStart does have an installer, it does not necessarily have to be installed on the hard disk.

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