Review: Go to work on a USB stick drive

In our view there is a whole lot of good reasons for setting yourself up with a bunch of portable apps on a stick drive - especially given that USB stick drives of 256MB and larger are now cheap, Win XP is so very widely used and the portable apps we've talked about are free and their setting up is relatively trivial, even for non techies.

The most obvious reason is so that you can work away from base without taking a PC with you - all you need is a stick drive that you'll use non-invasively on someone else's XP PC. Perhaps even more important is covering the eventuality of your work machine dying and trying to get on with your job or running a business without it - even assuming that you do religiously take backups and have the means to get at your data again.

Stick-based apps don't run as quickly as hard-disk-based apps and very likely won't be so convenient or intuitive to use as your normal apps - unless they are your normal apps, of course! But, setting up a working environment on a stick drive is so easy to do that it's worth doing just for the hell of it - and for the satisfaction of knowing you can go to work on a USB stick drive.