USB STICK MAKES MOBILE COMPUTING VIRTUALLY EFFORTLESS

One of the handiest tech devices I own is the USB flash drive. Simple, small, inexpensive and extraordinarily useful, the flash stick stands tall against its predecessors. Floppy discs -- the early 5 1/4-inch soft ones and the firmer 3 1/2-inch variety -- were bulky and boasted frightfully small capacities, ZIP drives were bulkier but expensive, and I really never cared much for CDs or DVDs for all their formatting variances and susceptibility to scratching.

The USB flash stick is sturdy, it fits in a shirt pocket, and you can get one with 16 gigabytes for about $10. That's enough to store thousands of photos, scores of music CDs or a few full-length videos. I also use USB flash drives as redundant backup devices, in addition to hard drives and online backup sites.

But USB sticks have another practical use: they can be used to store your favorite software programs for use anywhere.

Many popular programs in recent years have been redesigned and trimmed to fit on a USB stick. You can plug USB drives into a computer at work, a hotel or computers in other public spaces, and gain access to your programs without the need to go through a full installation on another computer.

Most businesses, for security reasons, do not permit employees to install their own programs on company equipment; a USB drive lets you avoid contact with your office computer's sensitive registry files and operate the program safely through the USB drive.

If you are using programs in a public space, perhaps at a coffeehouse, for personal business, using a USB flash drive means there will be no trace of your activity on the remote computer.

And there's one other big plus: You can pretty much undertake any task - word processing, photo editing, listening to music -- with portable software that's free.

Simply search the Web for software you're interested in. For instance, a Google search for "Firefox browser portable" will yield sites where you an obtain free copies of the popular browser that are designed specifically for portable drives.

But even easier, you can stop by portableapps.com, a website produced by a team of developers and designers who have amassed dozens of open source programs of all types and incorporated them into a framework that is easily installed on your USB stick.

You can initially download as many programs as you desire using the portableapps installer. You can add or remove others anytime you want.

There's something for everyone.

GIMP is a wonderful Photoshop replacement that handles virtually any photo editing task you can throw at it. It has selections, layers, color and lighting adjustments and filters.

You can manage your photo collection with IrfanView or XnView.

Take your pick of top browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or perennial technophile favorite Opera. Outlook is not available in portable form but Mozilla Thunderbird is a strong replacement.

Make free and low-cost phone calls with Skype, play songs from your music collection with Songbird, an iTunes-like music management system, and watch videos of any format with the VLC Player. You can compress and unzip files with 7-Zip and do routine disk cleanup chores with Eraser.

One of the most extraordinary values is Openoffice.org, a program we've covered a few times over the years, a suite of programs that mirrors Microsoft's Office -- a word processor, spreadsheet application and presentation program -- but without the several-hundred-dollar price tag. It may be the best bargain on the Web.

Pick up an 8GB or 16GB USB drive or two and create your own robust software library to use anywhere you choose at portableapps.com.

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It's a wrap for this season. The column is on hiatus for the summer, and I hope all of you get plenty of time off to enjoy the season. To longtime reader Nina B., best wishes for a speedy recovery from this week's procedure, I know you'll do fine.

I'll continue to check my email, so keep your questions and comments coming -- please be patient, the messages sometimes pile up -- and let's get together again in the fall.

Credit: Contact Peter Grad at [email protected]