Have you ever used another computer to find out it doesn’t have a program you really enjoy using? Or, not have it fine tuned to your own style? To avoid situations like these, I always try to carry my pen drive full of Portable Apps.

Portable Apps are programs you can install and run directly from your pen drive, without the need to install anything on the machine itself. The list of applications available is pretty good, including: ClamWin, The Gimp, 7-zip, OpenOffice, VLC, XAMPP, GnuCash, Firefox, Thunderbird, and a couple dozen more.

This is one of the most popular, and most essential, open source projects currently available. OpenOffice.org, or just OpenOffice, or simply OOo, is your multi-platform alternative to MS Office.

For the basic and intermediate users, OpenOffice will suffice as an office suite. Don’t think you’ll be loosing productivity if you used OpenOffice, it has a lot of the same features that the proprietary solutions. When you start using OpenOffice, you will spend a bit of time to find where the functions are, but don’t worry, you’ll find them.