Kieran Senior

• Published:February 20th, 2008
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Pages

Seeing as though I got a 4GB Corsair Voyager USB key for Christmas I thought I’d make better use of it rather than using about 10MB of it.  Last night I installed Portable Apps onto it which is just an application allowing you to install applications onto your USB key and use on any computer without having to install anything on the host computer.  I’m running firefox off it right now in fact.

As good as it is, there are some quirks which I’d like fixed in perhaps future versions to make it more usable.  For a start, is it possible to auto-run from a USB key? At the moment you have to manually run the executable located in the root of your USB key in order to start the application, which although isn’t too much trouble, it would save a lot of time.  I’ve just setup Launchy to be able to open up Portable Apps (manually added it) which saves a bit of time.

Secondly, you can run multiple instances of Portable Apps.  Is there no way to stop this from happening when one is running? Also, you have to click on the icon in the lower right-hand corner in order for it to pop up. Surely there should be a keyboard shortcut?

Finally, I’ve noticed there’s documents, music, pictures and video folders in the application, however, documents just leads to the root directory containing music, pictures and video folders.  Personally I have a lot of documents which I’m constantly working on, and this means there’s no specific quicklaunch folder for them, and they have to be nested in sub-folders not native to the application.

Other than that, for what I use it for it’s excellent and am currently using Open Office, Pidgin, Firefox and xampp on it.  It also comes with a couple of games dependent on the version you get.  The default theme isn’t very nice, but from searching around I can see that there’s quite a few skins available for it.

Generally though, it’s most probably worth getting if you can trust all your data being on your USB key.  I’d say regularly backup the key in case you do lose absolutely everything