If you have been a computer user for a while, then you may have heard of FloppyOffice, which was - as you probably already guessed, a portable office software suite on a floppy drive!

Now in 2008, you probably can only find floppies in the dark recesses of closets, boxes and landfills - but FloppyOffice has been reincarnated as Tiny USB Office, which offers a wide variety of free, standalone portable software.

Tiny USB Office can be installed on any flash drive, even the 128MB ones, because it only takes up only 2.5MB of space on a drive, so you will still have plenty of space for your documents.

High quality CDs and DVDs have a lifetime of up to 30 years, while cheap blanks may fail after less than five years. Hence, hard disks, which are said to become error-prone after three to five years, may be less durable and reliable.

However, it’s much easier to transfer data from a hard drive, to date the capacity is much bigger, and when dealing with a mass of data, hard drives are of course cheaper, way faster and much more convenient to use for backups.

In my capacity as “the guy who knows something about computers”, I occasionally get a phone call from a frantic friend or acquaintance to come round and help them fix their computer. Their problems normally come about because they’d thought they’d see what would happen if they deleted the “Windows” folder or because they thought it was their lucky day when someone emailed them an attachment entitled “nakedBritneySpearsphotos.exe”. I guess you get the idea what kind of people we’re talking about.

We’ve already talked about Linux and why you should try it, but probably the hardest part of getting used to Linux is getting it in the first place. For Windows users, the simplest way is to use Wubi: it runs from Windows, installs Ubuntu to the drive of your choice, and automatically creates a setting in the Windows boot loader to add a second boot option for Ubuntu.

Last year I wrote an article on the benefits of encrypting your PC folders with Truecrypt and I also briefly touched on being able to encrypt your USB stick with Truecrypt. Well, the other day I received a nice new 2GB USB stick as a freebie and so I decided to install John Haller’s Portable Apps on it. But first I headed on over to the Truecrypt website to install the newly updated 6.0 encryption program.

What is your nastiest experience with viruses and/or other malware? The other day just before presentations my friend came to me with his laptop and showed me the havoc that had reigned on it! He had burnt some discs for others, using data from their USB drive and in the process got infected. Now he was unable to run Powerpoint, nor was he able to scan with the anti-virus as it won’t start a scan due to the infections (see the irony). Just the splash screens and boom - nothing seemed to run.

We all love our USB drives, don’t we? You should probably be using some portable apps on your USB drive – if not, check out our huge list of portable applications for your USB drive here.

In this post, I want to cover a few apps that will make managing your USB drive easier. In essence, I’ll talk about tools that can be used to make things easier if you’ve got a USB drive – not about apps that work from your drive.

So here we go - five applications to make things easier if you’re using a USB thumb drive.

This week on the podcast I am chatting with Travis Quinnelly, an author at Make Use Of and the blog’s Technical Editor. That is the guy who handles the technical end of things and makes sure that everything runs smoothly. This week we are talking about Wordpress, Plurk, Wikia search and other search engines, Adobe Air apps and Portable Apps and a bunch of other stuff, including the weather in Montreal, Canada and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

While we have mentioned SharePod in our free iPod tools round-up before, I wanted to take a closer look at this free iPod manager program that is designed to sync and manage my iPod.

To install SharePod, visit the SharePod download site and download the .zip file. Once you unzip it, you can either drag and drop SharePod onto your iPod or run SharePod directly from your hard drive. Because it does not require any installation to your hard drive or “Programs” folder, you can also install it onto your USB or flash drive. This is great if you use different computers or want to get some music from a friend’s computer without using iTunes.

During my day to day Admin duties I get a lot of people pulling me over to the side to ask me “home networking” or “personal” questions. A normal one I get quite frequently is “how can I find out the IP address of a device on my network?” or “What is my TiVo’s IP?”

These end users always make it seem like they are trying to sell me Drugs a kidney on the black market…

“Pssst… Karl. Umm I have a… Ummm”

“What’s going on random end user dude?”

If you’re interested in installing Linux on your hard drive, but you’re a little worried about the prospect of partitioning your drive, there is a way for Windows users to avoid that learning curve. Wubi, which stands for Windows Ubuntu Installer, was designed to make dual-booting as easy as pi pie. The project hasn’t been around very long, but it has already gotten to the point that it will be included on the Live CD (”desktop cd”) for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the Hardy Heron, due out next Thursday. I’m beta-testing the release, and it’s looking very good.

Last time, I wrote about Live CDs and how you can make your own custom one. Live CDs are great, but let’s face it, sometimes even a CD is just too big to carry around. You male geeks probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but the other ladies can testify that the pockets on our clothes are just too small to carry around anything bigger than a small cell phone. CDs also have the magic ability to go from pristine to horribly scratched about 5 minutes before you need them and, since they’re CDs, don’t save changes.

Do you want to take your favorite programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more wherever you go and use them on pretty much any computer ? If so here are four free tools that can help you with that. These are portable software packs that can be installed on any USB device. Download the pack, install it on your portable device and done. Use it at work, a friend’s PC, college lab, anywhere.

An oddity of open source operating systems is the Live CD. It’s not something you’re likely to see coming out of Redmond or Cupertino any time soon, but for a few years now many Linux distros and versions of BSD have given this option. Recently, Live DVDs and Live USB have cropped up as well. These live systems are full versions of the operating system that run completely from the given medium. Which means you can carry them in your pocket and use them on other computers. They do not, by default, touch the hard drive, so they are completely safe to use.

The new Firefox 3.04 beta is out but the beta testing tag is enough to unnerve many people into waiting for a more stable version. If you can’t wait for the stable version but at the same time you don’t want to risk your Firefox profile on the buggy beta version, you can have the best of both worlds - use the portable version instead.

About two years ago I gave up trying to memorize all of my online accounts. I used a “three tier” password system for a while - with a low security, medium security, and high security password for the majority of my accounts. However, this still did not leave me at ease - knowing that if on one of these accounts my password was compromized, it potentially left the others open to attack.

After looking around for different password managers, I came across KeePass. The main features that drew me to this program:

One thing that is guaranteed to irritate me is when I have to email a file to someone and the file is too big. What do you do then? Well, you could compress it or you could use one of file transferring services such as Pando. But recently I discovered another possibility. Using the freeware program JR Split File, you can split the file up into little pieces - and then the person at the other end puts it all back together again.

Television sets and CD players are rapidly becoming a thing of the past for me. I spend most of my waking day in front of the computer and so I have adopted the practice of having DVD’s and CD’s playing in the top right hand corner of the screen while I work. Whether it’s a DVD rental from the shop, BBC streaming news broadcasts or the new iTunes download, media players have become an essential part of my internet life.

Here’s a brief selection of the media players I have encountered over the past few years.