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Now that the floppy disk is dead (or as dead as it gets) and the USB flash drive has pretty much replaced it, it's high time to think about that USB drive as more than just a big floppy.

There's no question the size of your average USB drive has made it far easier to shuttle both data and applications between computers. For $25, you can pick up a 2GB USB flash drive, enough data to fill roughly four CD-ROMs. But aside from data, applications are also becoming a featured item: Some companies sell Linux distributions pre-loaded on a USB stick, for instance. With all that space and flexibility available, it's become possible (or at least a lot easier) for people to take both their data and their applications with them.

Because so many things are possible, people new to the idea of using USB drives to work on the go sometimes get a little lost. What kinds of on-the-go work can you specifically do with a USB drive, and why? To that end, I've assembled five basic ways you can use your USB drive on the go in more effective ways:

• How to use applications without installing anything on the host machine.
• How to run a standalone operating system from a USB drive.
• How to maintain a standalone (and secure) password repository.
• How to synchronize data between two or more computers.
• How to encrypt your data so that it's safe to carry it around with you.

The vast majority of the material described here is for Windows — the PortableApps suite, for instance, is a Windows-only item at this point. Some individual programs do exist in Linux incarnations, though — TrueCrypt, for instance, and KeePass has been unofficially translated into Linux and MacOS editions (as well as a U3 device edition). Check the respective Web sites of each application for what versions are available, as they may change over time.

A Note Of Caution: Sorry, You Can't Plug That in Here
As usage of portable USB drives rises, so does caution about their use. Many workplaces and public-access computers no longer allow USB devices to be connected as a security measure, or only allow read-only access (and don't allow non-approved applications to run). It can be frustrating, especially if the data you brought with you is encrypted and you need to run an application to get access to it.

As a general rule of thumb, if you don't think you can log into a given system as an administrator, chances are you won't be able to do the vast majority of things you might expect to do with applications or data on a USB drive. Be prepared to fall back to a data-only or read-only setup if you think you're going to be going back and forth between home and other machines that are heavily locked down.

Be Productive — Without Installing Anything
Most of us are accustomed to the idea that a productivity application — a program on the order of Word or Outlook in terms of size and complexity — has to be installed on a PC to be usable. It isn't something you can take with you.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, many common free/open-source productivity applications are available in portable versions. They can be run directly from a USB drive — with both the application and user data stored on the drive — and will never need to be installed anywhere to work properly.

The best place to start when building a collection of such apps is probably PortableApps.com Suite (PA), a preconfigured collection of programs that's a snap to unpack and get running. The default package of applications for the suite weighs in at about 256MB, and is like a free software greatest-hits collection, including mobile versions of OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird. You can also add other applications, including the 7-Zip archive manager, AbiWord (another open-source word processing app), the FileZilla FTP client, IM clients (Gaim and Miranda), the Sumatra portable PDF reader, and many more. You can elect to install as many or as few pieces as you'd like, and it comes with its own launch menu that you can customize with new apps of your own choosing.

A big reason to go with the PA suite rather than download productivity applications individually (although you can still do that) is that there is a fair degree of integrity within the suite. Everything in the PA suite has been pre-screened to work reliably in a standalone fashion, and each application is kept fresh and up-to-date. You don't have to worry about whether or not a given program will behave correctly; all that gruntwork has already been done for you.

Another point in favor of the PA suite is that it automatically saves user-created data in a directory tree that travels with the suite itself, so user data is never saved to the PC itself. PA even includes a backup utility which saves and restores user or application data (or both, or everything on the thumb drive) to an archive somewhere.

As tightly integrated as the PA suite is, you'll still need to keep an eye out for possible quirks. The antivirus program Clamwin, for instance, needed to be updated by hand after I'd downloaded the PA suite, but there were full instructions on how to do this on the PA site's page for Clamwin.

Likewise, the portable edition of OpenOffice behaves strangely if you don't have the PA suite folder installed on the root folder of a drive. When I tried running it from my desktop, it crashed, but after moving it to a thumb drive it worked perfectly. Also, because the PA suite is self-contained and doesn't install anything on your PC, things like document-type associations (for instance, for OpenOffice documents) won't be created. Finally, if you use the PA suite launcher on Windows 2000, there is (as of this writing) a bug that causes the launcher to crash — there is a patch for it.

The PortableApps suite isn't the only prepackaged collection of portable programs out there. Consider the far less ambitious but still impressive Floppy Office, which packs a nifty array of tiny little productivity tools into a mere 1.5MB archive.

If you're not interested in a suite, there are a lot of apps out there that offer portable versions. For example, there's a nice version of the Opera browser , which some prefer to Firefox. And if OpenOffice is not to your taste, you could swap it for a portable version of the Scribus word processor and page-designer application.

If you're still not satisfied, Listible.com has a whole subcategory devoted to portable productivity applications.

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