Ceedo came pre-installed on a 160GB portable hard drive. I use this drive to backup data from my home computer and my work laptop. The Ceedo application site has a very good selection of applications. Some are paid, but most of the offerings are free. My favorite is JetAudio, which I use to play music synced to the portable drive from my home machine. One of the nice features of Ceedo is the one-click eject; a single click closes the Ceedo application and makes the drive safe to eject. I also like how applications run from Ceedo can display a colored border to distinguish them from locally run applications. Overall, Ceedo is a solid portable application launcher.

U3 came pre-installed on a 2GB SanDisk cruzer USB Flash drive. I used the U3 applications for a couple months and was not satisfied at all. The U3 applications site was painfully slow, the application selection was poor, they are not frequently updated and many of them are trial software. The whole system it geared towards selling add-on software, not providing any type of portable convenience. The only nice feature is the one-click eject. The best U3 application is the uninstaller, which removes all U3 software and the extra system drive.

PortableApps is an open system that offers only free and open source software. There is a solid selection of software available, not as many as Ceedo or U3, but overall quality of applications is on par with Ceedo and blows away U3. The PortableApps Suite launcher is lightweight and fast. I use many of the applications available with PortableApps, some of which I discovered when there were converted to the PortableApps format.

• 7-Zip and PeaZip are file compression tools.
• AbiWord is a word processor that makes a great off-line blog writing tool. It doesn’t paste bloated markup like Microsoft Word!
• BonkEnc is a amazingly fast CD ripper. I’ve used EAC for a long time, but BonkEnc appears to be on the order to 10 times faster and is much easier to setup.
• FileZilla for FTP. I’m an old LeechFTP holdout. I tried SmartFTP for awhile, but it quickly got so bloated as to be not worth the nice interface. FileZilla now rivals LeechFTP and I’m not going back.
• KeePass is a password storage tool. Having the ability to store passwords securely on a USB drive is key for anyone who uses multiple systems.
• Mozilla Firefox, of course. The key extension is Google Browser Sync, which keeps my bookmarks and history synced between my home computer, the USB-based browser and various virtual machines. My browser settings anywhere!
• Notepad++ has become my coding tool of choice. I was a diehard HomeSite fan, but Notepad++ is stable, mature and frequently updated. I use it for HTML, CSS, Javascript, ActionScript, Linden Scripting Language, widgets, XML, game configuration files, etc.
• Task Coach is a new task manager. It’s still alpha software, but has a nice feature set and it updated regularly.
• WinDirStat is directory size utility, similar to, but not quite as mature as TreeSize.
• WinMerge is a file and directory comparison utility.

These are just the titles that I use, there are many more. I have also successfully installed some non-PortableApps software. Applications that don’t use the registry work best. The only downside to PortableApps is that ejecting the USB drive requires that you close the PortableApps Suite launcher and then eject the drive in Windows. This is a minor annoyance. The selection of applications and frequency of updates easily makes this my favorite USB application launcher.