We’re becoming far more portable in recent times. Whether this is down to employees working from home, the rise in WiFi connections made available in public places, or the fact that our modern mobile phones enable us to surf the web and access email outside of the office. The problem is though, unless we drag our heavy laptop everywhere we go, we do not always have access to our favourite applications, bookmarks, passwords and other information.

The secret is to leave the laptop behind and take a USB stick or external drive on the road, then install various portable applications that will work from the USB stick, without having to be installed on the host computer. Better still, any preferences and personal information will be stored on the USB stick, rather than the host. You can apply this to an iPod, so there’s no reason why you couldn’t turn your iPod (or other MP3 device) in to a portable hard drive, with all your info securely stored in an encrypted partition.

Portable Start Menu is a tool that you can use to launch applications from this portable USB stick or external drive. You can configure it on your computer, so it will quickly launch the applications you’ve got installed on the USB stick.