If you ever find yourself working on more than one computer (and these days, who doesn’t?), you’ve probably found yourself wishing that your data and applications could be quickly and easily ported to the various machines you work on, so that you wouldn’t need to spend so much time installing applications on your various machines, configuring them, and keeping them all in sync. If you have ever felt this way, you might be interested in the PortableApps.com suite of open source applications that can be run from just about any computer that can read from a USB memory device or just about any other type of storage device, like a memory card or even your iPod.

I’ve been getting a tremendous amount of mileage out of the PortableApps suite, which includes portable editions of such notable applications as Mozilla Firefox (in which this blog entry was written), Mozilla Thunderbird, the GIMP, and OpenOffice.org.

Although the better-known applications above tend to get most of the attention, there are a few others that are also quite noteworthy, among them:

Abiword Portable
If you need a word processor, but not necessarily all of the other applications included in OpenOffice.org, this lightweight application is a great alternative.

Sumatra PDF Portable
The sheer bulk of Adobe Reader is enough to send many users to popular alternatives like Foxit Reader, but it would be a mistake to overlook Sumatra PDF Portable, which might not have quite as many features, but is often even faster than Foxit, which is itself pretty impressive.

Task Coach Portable
This handy combination to-do list and task manager has functions for helping you manage your tasks through to completion, of course, but it also has functions for keeping track of how much time you are spending on each, which tasks are taking more time than you’ve budgeted for them, and how much revenue you’ve generated from each task.

GnuCash Portable
After you’ve found out from Task Coach how much money you’ve been earning on each task, the next logical step is to keep track of your total earnings in an application like GnuCash.

In addition to the applications I’ve mentioned already, there are also a number of very useful utilities and development tools available.

The only real downside to using the PortableApps software is that it is currently for Windows users only (or Linux, if you use Wine). (Mac users, if you know of similar offerings on the Mac side of the fence, please feel free to share them in the comments section.) For anyone who regularly needs to use more than one computer, the advantages of using PortableApps are numerous and compelling—try some and see for yourself!