I am a huge fan of portable software, many of which are items I can run on a system I do not control (e.g. work, library, etc). I use the PortableApps tool as my main container for everything I run but I also grab apps from individuals that don't use the PA site/format since you can add them manually. Main point here is, does anyone else use these with any regularity and what apps have you found to be the most helpful? Here is a list of my current apps Text File on Tresor Share

I will also add my most used portable app at the moment - QuiteRSS (no affiliation).

that's cool i never heard of something like this. in the past, i've typically used chocolatey to quickly install a bunch of apps on my computer (and others when i was doing IT work), but this looks like it solves the problem better

Software you can run off a USB stick is a godsend if you don't have access to your own computer for whatever reason.

I have not heard of Chocolaty before but I have used Ninite before. And in looking for Ninite since I could not recall the name I came across Ultimate Windows Utililty, might have to look into this a bit. Outside of those though I usually just install software via GPO since its easier and I can generally set preferences but since I moved out of IT last year (thank god, over it) I no longer have my fun credentials so I have to use portable software for most of my needs now.

This is awesome. A good friend of mine does something similar, but with wild bootsticks that have crazy portable executables for all kinds of windows distributions, hacktools, linux distributions, utilities, etc. on them. It's super neat stuff.

I used to have a USB stick that was similar, think I had 4 linux distros on it along with some PE environments for imaging/ghosting and one distro thats only purpose was to reset admin passwords on NT based workstations. I haven't had the need to use anything like that in at least a decade outside the PE I used for imaging workstations.

I use portable apps on my main laptop because they are lighter and I feel like my system doesn't get bogged down when I use those.