i like the power and portability of Portable Apps. from Open Office to Gimp and Blender to Sudoku

sim-on-a-stick is, of course, one of my favourites but i also use portable chrome like mad. one reason is that i can carry around my bookmarks and allow for autofill and passwords to be saved (don’t lose that stick!) rather than having all that appear on my day job computer. i don’t care about privacy so much because portable chrome still connects over the web so that can be tracked, but i don’t want others being able to log into any of my sites or transfer money from my bank (now if someone wanted to pay some credit card bills, i’d be all for that – i’m generous that way) =p

i find that portable apps run really fast. i don’t have any benchmarks, but maybe some apps run even faster since it’s flash memory? google chrome runs as well as the ones that are loaded on my home and work PC but i do have a problem at work with my portable chrome. there are times when i am doing html/css/javascript testing where i have IE9, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all fired up and all is well if my usb stick is not plugged in. however, as soon as i plug it in, if i try to launch the desktop’s chrome it fails silently – nothing happens. if i launch the portable chrome, it fires up just fine

there had to be a way to fix this (and not use chrome profiles) and finally i came across this method which worked for me in Windows. since i launch both versions of chrome via shortcuts, all i needed to do was append the desktop chrome version number to the desktop shortcut’s target line (i didn’t have to change anything for the portable shortcut). you can find the version number which is under your user account application data (for Win 7 it’s c:\users\your name\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application and for XP it’s c:\Documents and Settings\your name\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\

once that was done, i could launch both versions and all was right with my little world

if you haven’t explored portable apps yet, there are some pretty interesting ones including a password manager (something i should use!) and even a portable planetarium =)