Portable applications

Most computer technicians use USB flash drives to store useful diagnostic/cleaning/maintenance tools and utilities, but what about the average home user? Portable applications (or portable apps) are computer programs that can be stored on and run from a flash drive, mp3 player, CD, or whatever without having to be installed onto the host computer. What are the advantages of portable applications? Apart from the obvious, that the device on which they reside can be moved from computer to computer they save valuable hard drive space, do not create any registry entries or store files on the host machine, so no uninstall is necessary; removal is simply a matter of deleting any associated files from the portable device. All kinds of portable applications are available: browsers, media players, email clients, security products, office components and lots of lovely tools and utilities. Portable applications will generally download in a zip package which can then be unpacked to the flash drive. Or you can download to the computer and then move the file onto the flash drive. Quite a few sites are dedicated to listing free portable apps, for example App-Stick, and PortableApps.com.