Better than a notebook? I found this page which details a list of applications made to or able to run on thumb drives. Having my own little thumb drive, I tried a few of the programs out.

The first one I tried was Trillian. At work, for some odd reason Gaim is installed. I followed the directions and soon had myself a portable version of Trillian. It works great! I was even able to migrate all of my settings from my home install over to my thumb drive. The only downside I’ve found is all of this stuff uses up 25-30MB of space on my puny 128MB drive. So I guess if you have a 512MB or 1GB drive, it’s not such a big deal.

Next, I tried Portable Firefox. Again, install went smooth, no problems. I even was able to port my home computer’s profile over to the drive. The extensions all worked and all my preferences were saved. In all, it only uses about 10MB of space.

At work all I have to use is Windows Meda Player 8. I can’t really stand to use it. It works ok, but I hate the interface. My attempts at installing WMP 9 and 10 on my work PC ended in blue screens of death citing regsitry errors. Luckily, one of the items listed in the article was XM Play which upon downloading, is pretty damn cool. It’s tiny; less than 450KB. Yet its able to play MP3, Ogg, WMA, etc. The only thing I found that it doesn’t play is CDDA (CD Audio). With a little research, I was able to get a Winamp CDDA plugin and install it. Once again, this app works perfect!

Give some of these a try, there’s a bunch more applications to check out and that could be very useful.