With 250 or 500 GB hard drives on most desktop PC systems, people hardly give any thought to disk space when they download and install various software packages. For example, when you last upgraded to FireFox or installed some shareware application you downloaded from the Internet, did you check to see how much space it took up on your hard drive? If you’re like me, then probably not!
With most Netbooks having only 8 or 16 GB of storage space, you really can’t install apps and files haphazardly. You need to carefully decide which applications you really need, as you could quickly fill up your available disk space.
Luckily, there’s been a movement to create “portable” applications that will fit on a USB Flash Drive, so you can take your applications and files with you. The thought being, you could walk up to any PC and insert your USB Flash Drive with your portable applications and files, do some work, then pull your USB drive out and be on your way. As such, Netbook users can take advantage of these portable apps to help save on valuable disk space.
Now, we’re not talking about water-down or wimpy applications, but rather rich, full applications and utilities that have been slim down to reduce their installation size. A perfect example is a package of freeware applications called PortableApps available on www.portableapps.com. This suite of applications are designed to be run from a USB Flash Drive, however, they are perfectly suitable for use on an Netbook (or any laptop, for that matter). Being a suite, the main interface for PortableApps is a single, simple window where you can launch one of the portable applications or access your data files (see below):
As you can see from the list, the available applications are well know freeware “clones” of several big name products. OpenOffice is an excellent suite of tools that mimic Microsoft Office applications (MS-Word, MS-Excel, MS-PowerPoint, etc.). You also have the FireFox web browser (my personal favorite) as well as Thunderbird (Email Client) and Sunbird (Calendar), all of which are very nice applications that can certainly replace MS-Outlook. KeepPass is an encrypted password protection program, and there are a few other useful applications.
Now, if you like the suite GUI interface as shown in the previous image, you can use the PortableApps as-is. I personally like to launch my applications just as I do traditionally on my desktop PC, so I can make shortcuts to the the actual application executables in their respective install folders and launch them independently. Either way, you can save on disk space using these portable versions over installing the full version. For example the entire PortableApps suite takes up 350 MB of disk space when installed (if you leave out the OpenOffice products, the size is 100 MB). That has to be much better than installing the full Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 Suite, or even the full OpenOffice Suite. For me, I’m planning to use these portable apps and delete out the ones that I don’t plan to use (e.g., Pidgin, ClamWin, CoolPlayer, Mines) and save a bit more space.
Below is a list of the PortableApps and a brief description:
Now, if you just want to install just the Portable version of OpenOffice, you can get the files here (installation will take 240 MB). You can also get other portable versions of popular apps at this link. Definitely worth checking out…
