A portable office is a set of applications on a device that can be used in situations when the computer you’re using isn’t your personal computer or it has been locked down by your IT department. Before you read any further, please be advised that this will only work on Windows-based computers.

1. Choose a size

The first consideration you should have is what size of a drive you need. For most people, 1GB will work just fine. For those who will be frequently editing documents, I would suggest 2GB or more. I personally have a 4GB drive, but that’s because it’s also holding my music.

2. Choose your platform

There are three solutions to this problem that I’ve used in the past. The first was the U3 software that came with my SanDisk drive. I’ve abandoned that one entirely and won’t ever go back (here’s why). The second solution I found was the PortableApps suite, but I’ve also decided not to use that one because it’s not flexible enough in menu editing. The third, and current, solution is PStart. I use PStart because it’s light and flexible. The UI is non-intrusive and simple, and it’s easy to add and remove apps from the launcher. In my opinion, you should choose either PStart or PortableApps.

3. Define which applications you need

If you’re not sure what you need, you can try choosing one of the PortableApps ready-made suites. I actually use PortableApps.com to find a majority of my applications, so it’s a great resource even if you decide not to go with it. Here is a list of the applications I have installed: 7-Zip, CommandPrompt, FileZilla, Firefox, KeePass, MPlayer, Notepad++, Pidgin, PuTTY, Sudoku, SumatraPDF, Thunderbird, VLC, WinDirStat, and WinSCP. All these can be found on the PortableApps site. I also have a few Sysinternals applications too, namely ProcExp and TCPView. You can decide which apps you need, and go from there.

4. Installing PStart

I’m going to walk you through the process of installing a platform and applications on your flash drive using the PStart platform (download). The first thing you should do is find all the applications you want and download them. Once you’ve done that, we can commence.

If you have anything on your drive, be sure to back it up now.

Run the PStart installer. The installation is pretty standard, but here’s a few screenshots to guide you.

Be sure you select Portable setup from this window. When you select that, you can choose your portable device (if multiple are present) from the menu at the bottom right.

This screen confirms your choices. It also shows that the PStart installer takes only 900KB of disk space. Click Install now to install it. On the next screen, click Finish and PStart should launch. When you launch PStart, it puts an icon in your tray. To access the panel, left click on the icon and choose Show panel.

Once you’ve got PStart running, you can set it to come up in the autorun menu when you insert your drive. To do this, go to Setup -> Create autorun file… from the PStart window. This will create an autorun.inf file at the root of your flash drive, and that allows Windows to use it in the Autorun menu.

5. Folder Organization

Before you install any applications or drop anything onto your drive, I suggest creating two folders at the root of your drive. Create one folder for programs (Programs) and one folder for documents (Documents). This will help you keep things organized when your drive is populated.

6. Program Installation

If you use any of the applications from the PortableApps site, the installations go pretty much the same, so I’ll just choose one application and show how it’s done. On each application page at PortableApps, it tells you how much space each application will take up, so make sure you’re considering disk space when installing applications. Below, I’ll install Firefox 3.

This is the page where you’ll choose where you want to install the application, and the location where you would install it if you’ve been following directions. The second step to the installation process is to tell PStart that you want to add the application to its launcher. Hit Ctrl-A or go to Edit -> Add File to add the executable to the menu. If you prefer drag-and-drop, navigate to the FirefoxPortable.exe (\Programs\FirefoxPortable) and drop it into the PStart window.

7. Installing other applications

You can really use any .exe that doesn’t physically install to the hard drive. For instance, to install Sysinternals tools, I created a Sysinternals folder in \Programs and dropped all my .exe’s into that folder. Then, I created a folder in PStart and added all the tools to that folder.

8. End Result

Here’s what my PStart panel looks like after installation is complete:

It’s really easy to create your own portable office and use the applications you’re comfortable with. With some third party tools, you can sync all your bookmarks and data between your home machine and your portable applications. I carry my flash drive at all times, and it’s come in handy quite a few times.