Moreover, the PortableApps Suite recognizes non-PAF applications, too. You can also install a portable application in the PAF format even if you don’t use the PortableApps Suite. Simply press on the Options button in the PortableApps Suite panel, select Install a New App, and point to the PAF package. Most applications at the site are available in the new Portable Application Format, which makes them simple to add to the PortableApps Suite. If this much code is too big to fit your USB stick - or if you prefer to handpick the applications - you can opt for the bare-bones version of the PortableApps Suite, which doesn’t include any applications, and download individual applications from the PortableApps Web site and install them one by one. The Standard version takes a 512MB USB stick, while the Lite version, where Portable is replaced with AbiWord, fits on a 256MB USB drive. The result is a neat environment with a wide range of preinstalled portable applications from the Portable office suite to the ClamWin Portable anti-virus tool.

You don’t have to be a savvy computer user to install the PortableApps Suite: just download the version you want (you can choose between the Standard and Lite versions), double-click on the downloaded file, point to your USB stick, and the installer does the rest. In addition to the programs mentioned above, the suite contains more than a dozen desktop applications. The idea behind the PortableApps Suite is to provide an entire portable environment as a single installable package comprising everything you need: applications and additional utilities that make portable computing more efficient. Haller, who also brought us Firefox Portable, Thunderbird Portable, and Portable, is designed to solve these problems, making it dead easy to turn your USB stick into a portable application platform and add a couple of useful features for good measure. While the process of creating a portable computing environment (a fancy term for a set of portable applications on a USB stick) is not particularly complicated, it does require some manual work, and the final result may not be as polished as you might like.

Portable apps suit