• Office software

OpenOffice is the natural choice for a portable suite of programs, but now there is no need to worry about installing on the local machine, just run it from your USB. Portable OpenOffice has been developed by scaling down the package to enable operation from a USB device. Your complete software office on a stick.

If you only need a word processor or text editor there are many to choose from but AbiWord has been adapted by CraigWeb.net to specifically run from your USB having all the features but taking up less space and fewer resources than OpenOffice. As usual it supports the normal and Microsoft formats.

Need to be a bit more organised, then the PIMs are for you. Portable Sunbird is a development of the Mozilla project and offers the standard calendaring /event management, with the capability of setting alarms and appointments. EssentialPIM is a similar but more sophisticated product that includes address book and contact management capabilities.

Are you an engineer or have to use a lot of documentation on a day to day basis or need to carry around your service manuals with you. Then load up your .pdf's, to your USB add Foxit PDF reader and you have instant access to all the information you need for the job in hand.

Dont forget the PDF writer though, several are available from sourceforge.net, it may not be a USB program but without it there would be nothing to read.

The popular freeware image manipulation package Portable Gimp is now available in beta form, this is another of the tools used in our own development process. It's a bit quirky to follow the menu structure but for the average user it contains all of the facilities you could require, just learn about layers and the alpha channel and there will be no stopping you. Retouching your photo's or creating images is no problem, you can also convert between formats, batch process files, render images, opportunites are almost endless.