25 Must-Have Thumb Drive Apps

TrueCrypt – encrypt your thumb drive to protect your information

ToDoList – A tak management tool that allows you to repeatedly sub-divide your tasks into more manageable pieces whilst still presen¡ting a clean and intuitive user experience. (Windows Only)

Portable Firefox – Leaves no personal information behind on the machine - you can take along your browser/extensions/bookmarks anywhere

Pidgin Portable – All-in-one instant messaging (supports AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, G-Chat, etc)

WS FTP32 – ftp client

FileZilla – yet another ftp client

Notepad2 – a fast light-weight advanced text editor with syntax highlighting

Notepad++ - this is one of my favorite text editors – now made portable

Color Cop – this is one of my favorite freeware apps – includes an eyedropper you can drag over any window to grab the color value. It then offers a palette of 42 complimentary colors to the one you've picked.

Ifranview – a light little graphics viewer/editor that packs a big punch. You can use it to work with screen captures, create slideshows and more

GIMP – the popular open source image editor packaged as a portable app – very robust

7-Zip Portable – handles zip, gzip, tar, rar etc

Allway Sync – syncs files between your thumb drive and PC

Unknown Devices – helps you find out what the unknown devices in the device manager are

TestDisk – data recovery software that can recover lost partitions or make drives bootable again

UTorrent – my preferred bit torrent client – I love having this with me wherever I go

Roeder's .NET Reflector – recently purchased by Red Gate, this still-free app can be used to explore .NET assemblies, understand relationships between classes and methods, find where types are instantiated and exposed or check that code has been correctly obfuscated before release. There are also over 30 add-ins available.

Process Explorer – formerly Filemon and Regmon, this is an invaluable sleuthing tool

TightVNC – based on the popular VNC remote control software, this version can live on a thumb drive

WinMerge – compares differences between files and merges changes. It has the same features as the desktop version

Text2Html – a text to HTML converter – converts text files into HTML format

Portable Apps Suite – this is the mac-daddy of them all – it includes Firefox, Thunderbird(email), Sunbird(calendar),ClamWin (antivirus), Pidgin(see above), Sumatra PDF Readable, KeePass Password Safe, OpenOffice, CoolPlayer (audio Player) and even a couple of games

Restoration – Recover accidentally deleted files – even after they were deleted from the recycle bin

Infra Recorder Portable – cd and dvd burning

RockXP – allows you to recover windows passwords or keys, change keys, display system password, and more – sneaky!