The Cheat Is Not Dead, Long Live the Cheat!

Welcome to the Portable Lifestyle or why I never leave home without my Firefox. For those who are new to PortableApps, the basic concept are programs that can run from flash or portable hard drive media without leaving behind registry keys or other personal information. This allows you to bring your favorite applications with all of their configurations and not have to worry that any of your personal information is being left behind. PortableApps.com puts out a number of these programs and organizes them in the PAF or Portable Apps Format, though this blog will not exclusively consider programs in this format.

I've been meaning to write about these programs for some time, as they have really become a part of my every day life. I use these programs for work, for school, and for play, and am constantly looking for the newest program to take for a test drive. I run my programs from a 60GB portable hard drive (named The Cheat Is Not Dead) on a variety of different computers ranging from the very latest to my personal machine, a Pentium 4, 2.53GHz processor with 512MB of RAM running on Windows XP. Part of the reason for testing these programs on "older" machines is to allow people of all experiences (including those of us who turn to open source because we're poor college students), to make their computer experiences better and to be able to take more of their stuff on the go without needing an expensive laptop.

A little about me. I am a computer science engineering major at The Ohio State University due to graduate in June of 2008. I have been using portable apps for over three years, and use them in my job as a software developer for a major company almost every day. I have more than 50 portable programs and am always looking for more. I started with a 128MB flash drive and now have a 1GB, two 128MBs and my 60GB Hard Drive which is my primary portable drive. Actually if you want to get technical about it I started with a box full of about 70 floppies but I'll talk more about that in another post.

This blog has three purposes:

• Review Portable Apps both official (from portableapps.com) and unofficial
• Provide configuration and customization tips to make the apps serve you better
• Offer commentary of what working this way will mean for the industry and for our lives generally

A few disclaimers:

• I am not associated with portableapps.com or John T. Haller in any way. I am a member of the portableapps.com forums and beta test new software.
  
• While this site provides some technical help, I have not nor cannot test these programs on every machine or configuration. Just use the same common sense you use when installing any new Open Source Software.
• To my knowledge, the programs I write about are open source and/or freeware. I will not post methods for using commercial applications portably and I will remove any responses which contain such methods.
• I appreciate any software recommendations from people (I'm always looking for something new), but even if I test it, it may not appear in the blog for some time.
  

I hope you will find this blog interesting and informative. I'll try to post once a week or so, but as I am a student in my last year expect a little less at midterms and finals.

My next post will cover portable web-browsing (how it all started for me). In it I will review Portable Firefox 2.0.0.11 (assuming there isn't another bug fix between now and then), the latest Portable Firefox 3 beta, and Opera 9.24 Portable, both on flash and hard drives.

Keep warm out there!