Every time I head over to London on a business trip, I forget how heavy my laptop seems to feel by the end of the day. Take a MacBook Pro, plus power cables, and it's a surprisingly heavy weight. You do wonder if there are better solutions. Apart from purchasing a Netbook, the other option is to take a Blackberry, which will enable you to access your email on the move. The other solution is to use someone elses machine (and there's nearly always a temporary host PC you can use in the office) and take portable versions of your favourite software on a USB stick.

PortableApps Suite Standard 1.5 is a collection of free portable applications, including Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice, that you can use from one central interface. Simply place this on an external drive (USB, flash or even your iPod Classic), plug this in to a temporary host PC and you should be able to use your apps without writing personal information to the host computer.

PortableApps Suite link. 

10 Mar 2009