It’s time once again for our featured Movers and Shakers post. Each week we are taking one software category and listing the top ten most downloaded apps in it.
This week we are looking at portable applications. These are the apps that can be carried on a USB thumb drive and can be used on pretty much any computer.
- winPenPack Flash 1GB
- Little Registry Cleaner Portable Edition
- winPenPack Flash School
- Uninstall Expert
- PackageFactory for U3
- Skype Portable
- CodySafe
- CodySafe Admin Pack
- winPenPack Flash Essential ““ Multilingual
- FCleaner Portable
Weighing in at first place, raking in 13,696 downloads this week, is winPenPack 1GB. It is a suite of portable applications. It has over 100 useful shareware apps that will make your life easier carrying them around on a USB drive. This is a must for tech support guys like myself! We have mentioned similar portable app suites on MakeUseOf before.
Now we have all been in situations where we had to clean the registry on another person’s machine. In this situation you can run this registry cleaner to find and destroy obsolete registry entries.
Ah another winPenPack – this one is geared towards students. This pack comes with over 50 apps from 8 different categories all aimed at helping you learn and further your education. The categories are titled Computer, Geometry, Graphics and Drawing, Languages and Translators, Math, Music, Science and Utilities.
For those pesky programs that leave behind remnants and other crap on your PC after uninstalling. If that iffy program you tried does not even have an uninstaller then Uninstall Expert is for you. It lets you run a deep scan and get rid of broken registry keys and files associated with the tool. Price: Free to try (7-day/12-use trial); $17.99 to buy.
Do you have a U3 enabled Flash Drive or Memory Stick? Have you ever wanted to customize your own applications to run on the U3 platform where you can plug your USB drive in and it launches the application living on it? Well this makes it SUPER easy to do and its free. Check it out.
Can’t install apps and you need your Skype? Do you use a lot of other people’s computers and want to bring Skype with you? It works the same way as the normal Skype but in a portable package. Don’t leave home without it! Before it was available officially, our very own Mark O’Neill had a write up on how to make Skype a portable app.
There has been a lot of hub bub about Cody Safe. They say that you can use it to create a computer on a stick. After looking at it I say it is a way to create your own portable application suites and have a place to save the files you work on.
This is a pre-created CodySafe pack for network admins, IT specialists and anyone who needs to deal with other peoples computers. You get a suite of apps but it also lets you script them so you can add commands before/after running an app from the menu. This can let you run batch scripts or registry files so you don’t have to do it manually.
This one offers up support for our non-English speaking friends. This is made for a 512MB stick and has apps in 7 categories. They are Graphics, Internet, Multimedia, Security, System, Office, and Utilities. There are a few freeware and shareware apps in the genre and usually the most popular of the bunch i.e. Firefox, uTorrent, GIMP, ClamWin, Foxit, etc.
FCleaner is similar to the above little registry cleaner due to the fact that it cleans your registry and supposedly speeds up your Windows computer.
Some of my favorite portable apps that have been featured on MakeUseOf in the past are:
NirLauncher, Transfer Time Calculator, Notepad, Google Chrome, Ccleaner, Windirstat, Format Factory, Liberkey, and SearchMyFiles.
Thank you for your suggestions and let us know what you think of the new format ““ like it, love or hate it? Your comments keep shaping MakeUseOf and we appreciate it!
Tagged: movers & shakers • portable app • software pack • usb drives
