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Portable Program Toolbar

Where ever possible, I use portable programs rather than full install programs for many reasons. The most important advantage for me is the ability to keep these programs sync'd off computer to an external drive or online storage enabling the ability to quickly recover all files, settings and data if and when you re-stage or re-image your system. Simply re-image and then mirror the portable folders back to the new image and you are back in business. If you use online real-time sync such as with SugarSync, it will automatically update your portable folders after you reimage and you can also keep these folders sync'd across all of your devices which is very useful (no more packing around a USB stick to update all of your devices.)

I also utilize a Toolbar on my Taskbar to quickly access or manage these folders and launch the programs (no external program launcher required.)

First create a single folder that contains all of your portable programs. You can see the structure I use in the above screenshot. I named the root folder "Portable."

To create the Toolbar, Right Click your Taskbar -> Toolbars -> New Toolbar and point it to the location of your portable folder. The toolbar will be created on your taskbar named after the folder which contains your portable programs. That's it.

You can use the toolbar by clicking on the ">>" which pops up the menu structure.

As you can see from the screenshot, I've done something similar to manage all of my bookmarks. Simply create a folder named Bookmarks and drag n drop all of your bookmarks into that folder. You can set up subfolders for categories just like what is done in the Portable folder and sync them the same way with the same advantages. They will work with any default browser. Never have to import or export bookmarks again.

Portable Websites