Review of Portable Apps

Written by Andy
Browser-Based Game Zone

I am writing this article in response to Nicholas’s post on Portable Apps. If you want to learn more about Portable Apps, please read Nicholas’s post or visit the Portable Apps website.

I installed Portable Apps onto a new, blank USB drive: an Apacer Handy Steno HT203 with a capacity of 1GB. Check the specs page for more details on it. The installation went flawless, running the installer from my computer and writing straight onto my USB drive. It took about 15 minutes, as the installer predicted. I installed the Standard edition which comes with OpenOffice, FireFox and a few more.

When I first ran the program, it went very smoothly and surprisingly fast. On the same computer, I ran FireFox, Gaim, and Thunderbird. They ran at nice speeds and functioned perfectly. I installed a new theme in FireFox, installed a plugin, saved my MSN details in Gaim and added some RSS feeds in Thunderbird. Again, everything went fine and all data was saved onto my USB drive.

I then installed more Portable Apps from the official website: VLC Media Player and FileZilla. Both installed properly and ran without a problem. I also copied some music files over, and images over. Portable Apps comes with a Documents folder along with Music, Videos and Images folders, just like in Windows.

After changing computers, I tried to access Portable Apps again. I ran Firefox and all my data was saved, including my web history and passwords and cookies. I installed some plugins and added some bookmarks. Here my first problem came up. After I restarted FireFox Portable, none of my bookmarks were saved. Even the default ones had disappeared. (They only disappeared after I added new bookmarks, they were still there before I changed anything) I’m guessing this happened because I didn’t unplug my USB drive safely, even though I took care to remove it only when the light stopped flashing. So far I haven’t been able to retrieve my bookmarks.

I tried out various OpenOffice programs, and they ran quite well. They were a little slower than the other applications, but then again, OpenOffice runs slow on my desktop as well. Still, it ran well enough that I could work on it without any big problems.

There were some things I really liked about Portable Apps. The Portable Apps menu looks similar to a Windows start menu, and it also shows how much space is left on your USB drive.

Of course, there were also some disappointments. I found that the amount of portable applications was rather low. I know this program is still new and considerable progress has been made, so I guess this will be improved in the near future. However, I looked on the forum for modifications for changing the look of the Portable Apps menu, and I downloaded a Vista-style skin. The problem was, I didn’t receive any instructions for using it. It was a zip file with three images, but I didn’t know where to extract them. I couldn’t find any other folder in Portable Apps that had three images for the menu.

All in all, Portable Apps is a wonderful application. It has made a lot of things easier for me, especially when it comes to working. Next time I use another computer, I can just plug in my USB drive, open up FireFox Portable, and I’ll have all my websites, history and passwords ready for me to use. I’ll have all my files in an organized structure and be able to edit them even if the computer has no editing tools available.