Make Your Favorite Programs Portable, Carry Them on a USB Memory Key

If you spend a lot of time on the road or interacting with different PCs, portable applications are really handy. You might already carry a small assortment of essential apps (like OpenOffice and Firefox) on your flash drive, for instance. But what if you could turn any Windows program into a portable app and store it on a flash drive for when you need it on the go? Now, it appears you can.

Cameyo is a free program that "virtualizes" any program you own, converting it into a single executable file that you can with you on the go.

I've tested it with a small handful of programs, and Cameyo works as advertised. When you want to virtualize a program, Cameyo takes a snapshot of your current system. Then you install the program in the usual way, while Cameyo looks for changes to the system. When it's done, you get a single file that you can carry with you anywhere. It's a time consuming process, but the payoff is a portable app. Here's a video that demonstrates the process:

As a pragmatic pessimist, I suspect that there are programs Cameyo can't virtualize properly; I didn't try Microsoft Office, for example, but if this program was going to have trouble with something, I suspect that mammoth suite would be a likely candidate.

But so far, so good -- Cameyo has made it a lot easier to live the road warrior lifestyle.