WindowShades - Soothe your screen-sore eyes

All our eyes are different, and personal taste is, well, personal. So what you find soothing to your eyes I may find painful. That's why this portable application is so cool: It lets you overlay your screen with colors that make screen viewing more pleasurable. From the developer:

"Creates a color-and-opacity configurable tinted overlay that maintains an "above-topmost" position in the window Z-order while at the same time being "click-through" so as to not interfere with the user's ability to interact with the computer."

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Toucan - Portable sync, backup and secure

Many of you know the usefulness of portable apps, which you carry around on your thumb drive. Here's one that is so tiny, yet provides more features than many full desktop apps. From the developer:

"Toucan is a small utility allowing you to synchronise, backup and secure your data with more options than the built in suite utilities. It is split up into 7 tabs, allowing you to easily find the function that you want. This version features:

* Four synchronisation modes, copy, update, mirror and equalise.
* Backup and restore in industry standard zip and 7-zip files, with support for complete backups, updating existing backups and differential backups, as well as restoring files from an archive.
* AES-256 encryption using ccrypt
* Command line support, allows you to create a batch file for repeated jobs
* Variables, point to places on you USB drive no matter what its drive letter is."

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winPenPack - A cornucopia of portable apps in a single download

Have a flash drive? (Or "pen" drive as the developers call them, hence the app's name.) Make it your portable computer by pre-loading it with apps galore. More from the devs:

"winPenPack is an applications environment of Free Softwares, modified for being run and used from an USB pendrive, without need of installation. The removable device, so, is no more a simple data container, but becomes a really self-contained environment, within programs and documents are homogeneously integrated.

"Portable" softwares included into winPenPack does not need to be installed, does not write their settings into host PC, and can be easily carried between multiple computers through any external device, as removable hard disks or USB pendrives.

After inserting the USB pendrive into a free USB port of host PC, user will have immediately available a collection of pre-configured and ready to use programs, subdivided in categories and executable through a practical menu, analogue to Windows menu Start, the winPenPack Launcher. User will feel as is working on its own PC, with web browsers, e-mail clients, image and drawing editors, chat clients, PC maintenance and security, school, development. All he needs, always available. All these features make winPenPack extremely useful in any field.

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Handy Shortcuts - Saves clicks and time

There's a saying that holds true sometimes: Shortcuts draw blood. But in this arena shortcuts save time and effort with no blood drawn whatsoever. This portable app lets you create some very handy (hence the name) shortcuts.

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XP Quick Fix Plus - Fixes 40 common XP problems

Maintaining a computer's efficient operation means fixing problems as they come. But sometimes they accumulate, simply because the computer owner doesn't know how to fix them. This portable app makes it easy, with a grid of quick fixes for some of the most common XP problems. From the developer:

"There are a lot of excellent free Windows comprehensive repairing and fixing tools around the internet.

But there are times when you want just one quick fix for example when you are under a virus attack and you just want to enable the Task Manager or the Registry Editor so you can fight the virus back, or when some new installation changed your XP behavior and My Documents opens on every start up.

This is the right time to draw XP Quick Fix Plus with 40 common Windows XP problems fixes, only 0.58mb, portable, small and fast, a must have on every computer and with a small extra, a command line utility to fix 6 common problems directly from command line!"

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SmillaEnlarger - Enlarge photos without losing resolution

Digital photos have a finite amount of information within them, which is why when you try to enlarge them, they get all pixelated. This small portable app lets you define a small area of your photo and enlarge it while retaining quality (no pixelation). From the website:

"SmillaEnlarger is a small graphical tool ( based on Qt ) to resize, especially magnify bitmaps in high quality."

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fotografix - A free Photoshop alternative at less than 1 meg

When you install a Windows app, the installer just sloshes parts of it all over your machine like an insane painter. That's why portable apps are so cool. Everything's in one file, ergo easily moved, ipso facto portable. This one does a fair imitation of the behemoth Photoshop and is only 680 Kb small.

"Enhance photos
Quickly correct and enhance photos and other images.

Compose rich artwork
Use layers and other advanced features to digitally compose art.

Automate frequent tasks
Make use of scripts to automate repetitive tasks."

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LiberKey Portable Apps - Now, that's a knife!

Excuse the Crocodile Dundee reference, please. This app groups gobs of software apps that you can load onto your thumb-drive or run from your desktop. It makes your thumb-drive the ultimate Swiss Army knife for your carry bag. From the web site:

"Portable use (installed on USB key, external hard drive, music player such as iPod, ...). It is possible because these software have been made portable. For example, LiberKey installed on your portable device can be plugged in any computer. Immediately you have under hand all your familiar tools."

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Freeraser - For when you really, really need to get rid of a file

The analogue world has shredders that chew up and spit out paper documents as a secure way of erasing the existence of a document beyond recovery. Burning is even more secure. But what about in the digital world?

Most folks don't realize that deleting a file on their computer doesn't erase it. All that does is tell the computer that it can use that space on the hard drive to store other stuff. It will eventually be overwritten, but even then it can be recovered for awhile yet.

This standalone app can be run from a thumb drive or from your own machine without installation. It places a temporary biohazard trash bin on your desktop, allowing you to drag and drop files that you really, really want to get rid of. You can specify that level of destruction you need. From the web site:

"# a fast destruction (standard 1-round filling of random data)
# a forced destruction (3 rounds of filling according to DoD 5220.22M standard)
# an ultimate destruction (35 rounds of filling with data according to Guttman algorithm)."

Freeraser

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