Recently discovered there are interesting new entries within my loved portable apps:

1. Skype, never thought it could ever go portable.
2. TeamViewer, one of my favorite collaboration and remote support tools. Really powerful, give it a try.
3. 2X Client, RDP remote client with interesting features.
4. Google Chrome (beta 4), personally I found that a portable browser is a must.

For the complete list of portable apps give a look here. Notice that almost everything is free.

It’s a long time I’m a big fan of portable apps, and – for at least two good reason – I use them not only from the USB pen, but even from system drive. First: as a developer I’ve a fresh OS installation relatively often and a simple copy is far smarter than many installations. Second, I can directly (via a network share) run portable apps from different machines (including virtuals I host). Not to tell the fact that settings and preferences always follow the apps and that my registry remains a little bit cleaner…

I wanna ensure you that, once you get used to this, it’s hard not to have it. So I started to collect the portable version of everything I can find, and currently my “Portable Apps” folder contains more than 50 apps. Every day I’m more convinced that almost everything should be portable, also (or especially) things like Visual Studio or other complex applications. I don’t want to list every single portable app I use, but let’s sat that…

I surf the web with Firefox Portable Edition and I read my email with Thunderbird Portable Edition and my feeds with FeedReader. I do IM with PSI (a jabber client – note that many jabber servers are server-side integrated with gTalk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and others), I download with Free Download Manager and uTorrent, I work on FTP servers with FileZilla Portable.

I use Foxit Reader for PDF documents, I view/edit text files with Notepad2, Notepad++ Portable and I take notes with Dark Room (see also Tools for writing and the way I write). I’m currently evaluating xMind for my mind maps.

I watch videos and movies with Videolan Portable, manage and look my pictures with Fastone, sometimes edit them with GIMP Portable. I listen web radio (check Radio SNJ!!!!) with RadioPlay and my music with CoolPlayer+ Portable.

And, of course, I work with Reflector (can’t not to cite), Snipper Compiler, a lot of stuffs by SysInternals,  SqlDbx, and others.

I’m still waiting (may be dreaming) for VMware Workstation Portable, Visual Studio Portable, Office Portable, Photoshop Portable…

Take a look also here:

• PortableApps.com
• List of portable software on Wikipedia
• Portable software on SoftPedia
• The Portable Freeware Collection