Carry Your Office on Your Keychain
With the price of storage at such a low, it’s a shame not to at least own a USB thumb drive. These little buggers are invaluable for those on the go, even if you only bounce between two or three separate offices. However, most people use these gizmos solely to house documents; to be used as file repositories, so that important data may be kept close at hand.
Fortunately, this doesn’t need to be the case! Your thumb drive can be utilized in a much more powerful capacity, by installing on them what are called “portable apps.” These are programs, just like on your PC, that can be installed on the thumb drive and used on whatever computer you connect it to.
Portable Apps (http://portableapps.com/) is a wonderful resource for these programs, and I will highlight five of the packages that Now IT Works employees recommend. And the best part is – they are all free!
KeyPass is a utility that consolidates frequently-used passwords in a simple, password-protected database. You can install the portable version on your thumb drive, then simply open the program to have access to your passwords. The software sports features like a random password generator (no need to remember them if you have them all documented, right?), AES encryption, import/export, database transfer and scheduling for password expiration.
OpenOffice.org
You have probably heard of OpenOffice by now. This is the completely free office suite that emulates Microsoft’s flagship software package. It can create text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases … the works! Plus, these documents can all be saved in formats that anyone can open. It’s a great addition to your arsenal, in the event you get stuck on a machine that doesn’t have Word of Excel.
GIMP is the open-source image editing software that’s sweeping the nation! Okay, the sweeping has been going on for a while now, since around 1996. But if you’ve ever found yourself without Photoshop when in dire need of some picture-editing goodness, GIMP can be a life-saver. It has almost all the capability of Adobe’s monster program, and is completely free, which is better than the $700 price tag of the former.
This little media player can play just about anything, from MP3s and WAVs, DVDs and CDs, MPEGs, AVIs and just about any other video format you can imagine. It has server functionality (though I wouldn’t recommend this for the portable version) and runs on any operating system. It’s the perfect solution to help you avoid having to use RealPlayer or WMP.
Best FTP client out there, hands down. Now offered in a new portable format.
