Put all of your favorite applications on your flash drive with a menu

I came across this amazing site yesterday called LiberKey. What LiberKey does is provide sets of free software that can be installed on your Flash drive. LiberKey comes with a menu., Select the program you want and run it right off of your flash drive.

This is how it works:

• By clicking the download button on the LiberKey web site you are taken to a page that lets you selct English or French. I chose English.
• Then select one of the packages: Basic, Standard, or Ultimate. To see what is in each package select Application List from the tab at the top of the page. The list is keyed to let you know what gets installed in each package.
• When it asks which directory to install it in be sure to have your flash drive installed and select a directory on the flash drive.
• LiberKey will start downloading the packages and installing them onto the flash drive, be patient this can take a while.
• After getting all of the software installed onto the flash drive LiberKey will prompt you to update some of the software. (LiberKey acts in many ways like Linux when it comes to updates) Now you will need to make sure that you have registered for a free account on the LiberKey web site. Your user name and password are required to get the updates installed.
• You should now be ready to use your installed software.

LiberKey doesn't install all of the programs on their site even if you choose Ultimate.  I wanted to add Open Office to my set so I needed to install it separately. At the LiberKey Menu choose LiberKey tools then click on add applications. LiberKey then opens Firefox off of the Flash drive and brings you to the applications list. I clicked on the little box next to Open Office and LiberKey handles the installation. I had a funny thing happen when I first selected add applications on the LiberKey menu. It kept flashing a box that didn't give me time to read it. After hitting the add applications menu enough times I was able to see that I needed to close Firefox. I had Firefox open from the installation on my hard drive and had to close it before LiberKey would open Firefox off of the key.

When everything is set up on your flash drive you should be able to stick the flash drive into any Windows based computer, run LiberKey (red circle with blue dot in the middle), a menu will appear, and select your program and run it. Be sure to go to LiberKey Tools in the menu and select enable file associations. This will temporaily associate files to the programs that you have on your stick. When you close LiberKey down and remove the flash drive then the association revert back to were they were before. This is a very handy feature.

So now you have all of these handy programs on your flash drive that can be used on any Windows computer. Pop in the drive and have all of your software tools at your disposal. I kind of like to think of it as having a software tool box in my pocket.

Have fun!
Dan