13 Kinds Of Portable Apps You Should Always Carry With You

Windows has many apps. Some, like Chrome or Office, are used all day. Others, such as TrueCrypt or Recuva, are rarely needed but essential when necessary. Portable apps for Windows serve two purposes: keeping obscure single-use apps on hand for when you need them, and carrying essential apps like Recuva, TrueCrypt, and your favorite browsers on a pen drive for use on other people’s PCs. However, it’s important not to overdo it with portable apps. Here are the must-have portable apps for Windows.

What’s The Best Way To Download Portable Apps In Bulk?

You can find over a dozen apps below. But what if you want to download all of them? Use the Portable Apps suite. It works as a downloader app – just select the apps you want and it will download them for you.

Follow our guide to load your USB pen drive with your preferred portable apps. Pen drives are affordable now. I suggest purchasing a 4-8 GB keychain drive specifically for this purpose.

1. Browsers Of Your Choice: Chrome, Firefox, Opera

It’s best to carry your preferred browser. What if you need to use a Windows XP PC with Internet Explorer 6? (A misfortune I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.) Here are some recommended browsers:

2. Antivirus, Antispyware, and Antimalware

If a PC is full of viruses, it may prevent internet access and downloading an antivirus app. Use these portable antivirus apps to resolve the issue. Malware can also infiltrate a PC and cause various problems. These bug zappers can prevent internet access and website opening. Keep them on your portable drive for convenience.

– ClamWin Portable

– HijackThis Portable (browser hijack scanning utility)

– Kaspersky TDSSKiller Portable (removes rootkits)

– McAfee Stinger Portable

– Spybot (spyware cleaner)

FileZilla is a popular FTP client and available as a portable app. XAMPP’s portable app is useful for starting an offline server for development on a new machine.

4. Downloaders: uTorrent, qBittorrent

qBittorrent, our favorite uTorrent alternative, is available as a portable download. uTorrent is also available as a portable download.

Adobe Reader is a terrible reader. If there’s a free alternative, I’ll always choose that. Sumatra and Foxit are both excellent PDF and text readers.

Carrying an offline copy of your passwords in a USB drive? KeePass is the best way to do it. There’s also a way to do this with LastPass.

7. Archive Utility: 7-zip

7-zip unzips everything.

8. Document Editing: OpenOffice, Notepad++

You can’t buy Microsoft Office for every PC you work at. OpenOffice is surprisingly close and portable.

Notepad++ is great for writing and coding. The app’s plugins increase productivity.

Did you know? Google Drive’s Docs, Sheets, and Slides can be used offline. Enable offline access from Drive’s website settings (Chrome required).

If a PC is beyond repair, use Recuva to recover important files and then format it.

Need to encrypt files on the go? TrueCrypt is for you.

11. Image Editors: GIMP, RIOT, Irfanview

Irfanview is best for basic image editing and viewing. When you need to batch process images, RIOT will have your back. GIMP is for those high-level image editing tasks.

Clean the system of temporary files, registries, and old files using the portable versions of CCleaner and Glary Utilities. We have conducted a detailed comparison of these two apps if you want to learn more about them.

13. Uninstallers : GeekUninstaller

GeekUninstaller is proficient in uninstalling apps and removing residual files.

Whats Your Must Have Portable App?

Did I miss something? What portable app can’t you live without? Let us know in the comments below.