My wife was going on a trip, handed me her old 2 Gb USB stick type mp3 player and asked me to install Firefox with her Favorites, Thunderbird with all her settings and recent emails, and an office suite, with all her documents from that week that she would be using. Oh, and could I make sure it had a builtin virus checker as she didn’t trust the PCs she might be connecting to and wanted to stay safe.

My first thought was U3. It’s the standard Sandisk Cruzer applications-and-file-handling mini operating system for their USB drives. I figured there might be a way to transfer the system from my Cruzer to her mp3 stick. No such luck, of course. Just on the off chance that it might work, I transferred the files but attempting to launch U3 launchpad throws up the obvious error, you might expect – “The U3 smart drive capabilities of this drive have been disabled. Double-click RestoreU3.exe to enable U3 on this drive…”

A search for this error message on Google threw up just one hit in Dutch, but there was a link entitled “U3 on NON U3 Drive” which looked promising so I followed that, only to find a raging argument about whether U3 could be run on non-U3 drives or not. One guy claiming that with a few hacks he has been able to install and run it on several cheap non-U3 drives. It all looked a bit hairy, so I abandoned that tack and headed back to Google to see if there was an open source option. Incidentally, U3 is a neat little system if you’ve got the right kind of USB. There is, however, an alternative that seems to be even more versatile – http://portableapps.com/.

PortableApps provides an open platform that works with any hardware – USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive etc etc. Their homepage lists the applications available and among them are Firefox, Thunderbird, and various others, including a version of Pidgin, the Instant Messenger application that mashes up various IM languages and lets you chat with users on different systems (hence the name), there’s also GIMP, which does something similar. The site also has ClamWin (antivirus) and a Notepad application as well as a port of OpenOffice. There’s even a version of the VLC media player, which handles just about every video type without having to resort to dozens of different codec downloads. The graphic on this post shows which apps come with the standard full install (the lite version is…lite).

It sounded just right. Best of all, as they say, it’s FREE.

It all installed quickly and easily, files and documents were neatly transferred and the virus definitions updated. So, U2 was great and I added a few of their mp3s to the drive for entertainment purposes, but for non-cruzers, it looks like U3 is redundant thanks to portableapps.com. Regardless, after all the searching and installing the trip was canceled, so I really needn’t have bothered.

I did notice a glitch while testing the system though. If you pull the plug before quitting the portableapps dialog in the tray it can trigger a memory dump blue screen, which requires a hard reboot on an XP machine. Not a big issue, just remember to quit before pulling the USB out.

What do you use your USB thumb drive for? Weirdest answer wins a prize, just leave a comment below, nothing too lewd though, please this is a family show!