The guys over at LifeHacker have a great article on how to Turn Your Spare Thumb Drives Into Feature-Packed Giveaway Drives. I don’t have as many thumbs drives laying around as they do, but I did find it a very useful list of applications. Some I was already using, other were a good find.
Keep reading after the break to see my highlights of the list.
Some of the “new’ applications that I found useful were:
- PStart: A menu application that allows you to setup links to the applications on your thumb drive. You run this when you first put in the drive and it puts a icon in your task tray. To start any application on your thumb drive you simply click on the PStart icon, then select from the menu.
- EjectUSB: I always found the Windows default ‘eject USB drive’ option a bit flakey. This little app searches for all apps running of the same USB drive that it is run from, closes them, then logically ejects the drive.
- Fast Copy: Not quite as good as SuperCopier2, but better than the default windows copy, and a little easier to use the Robocopy.
I also use the follow programs,
- Notepad++: Much better than Notepad, but a bit slow to start.
- VLC Media Player Portable: Plays just about anything, and has good keyboard shortcuts.
- FileZilla Portable: Good, portable, FTP program. Very handy when you need it.
- WinSCP: Handy little secure copy program. Not required all that often, but very handy when you do.
- DropboxPortable: Dropbox is a great site/app that allows you to sync data between several computers.
- Launchy: A greate little Start Menu short cut app.
- PuTTYPortable: Possibly the best terminal program there is, portable version.
- TreeSizeFree: TreeSizePro used to be very popular. I still like it. This is a free version that also works from USB drives.
There is also a great selection of other portable applications available at PortableApp.com, why not have a browse around.