Setting up Your Portable Office
by: Sal Cangeloso
If you have to travel, whether its out of your cubicle, out of your home, or out of the country, you should do your best to make your new surroundings as comfortable as possible. While so many things are out of your hands, one thing you can do to make your travels easier is to bring your favorite programs with you.
To do this all the things you will need are: a USB flash drive (practically any size) and a few minutes. When you get to your destination you will simply need a Windows computer, something which can be found in almost any library, office, hotel, or internet cafe any in the world.
The goal of having your internet browser, namely FireFox 1.5, with you where ever you go is not only so you don't have to get stuck using Internet Explorer, but also so that you can travel with your bookmarks and settings.
The process is very simple; all it requires is downloading Portable Firefox and putting the folder inside the zipped file onto your USB drive. This will give you a version of Firefox 1.5 which can be run from any Windows system with installation needed. Just go into the folder Portable Firefox and then run PortableFirefox.exe. That's all there is too it, but if you want to get advanced you can install plug-ins and extensions. Note: Flash and Shockwave can be added as plug-ins.
If you find that you have to use a Apple computer where ever you are going, a cross-platform version is available as well.
Portable email is just as easy, though a lot more useful. Portable Thunderbird does the trick here. Using this you will be able to get your email through a secure browser as opposed to using webmail, which get be very trying when you have a lot of mail to sort through or a lot of responses to make. Portable Thunderbird works exactly like Portable Firefox and can be opened and set up in seconds.