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Portable Firefox and Thunderbird
RHLJay writes "-For the Road Warrior on the Go-
If you have a laptop, desktop, and/or work PC keeping the information from Firefox and Thunderbird
sync'd with each other is hard, not to mention the extensions. Not anymore - John Haller has packaged both Firefox and Thunderbird into 'Flash drive friendly' executables which can be run directly from a USB flash drive. Visit his site for more info. Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird."
Honestly, have you actually tried Firefox? It loads quickly, and it doesn't require any configuring, at least on my machine, aside from standard installation-type stuff, it didn't. Unlike IE, though, it has several bonuses: You can configure it to do all kinds of cool and useful things if you're a Morlock instead of an Eloi (thank you Neal Stephenson), using any of a variety of useful tools; it comes with tabbed browsing; and it's pretty much adware-spyware-popup proof, unlike IE, every version of which (until XP SP 2) came with a handy "Always Trust Content from the Gator Corporation" checkbox. Bottom line is, Firefox is a much more flexible, streamlined browser, to suit a variety of needs, including those of the eloi who don't want to mess with all the messy details behind the pretty pictures on the screen. Comparatively, IE doesn't allow nearly as much useful flexibility, although you can get the Google toolbar if you are hard up (though that basically comes integrated in Firefox).
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she won't let you fly, but she might let you sing
But in windows you can disable this "feature" by disabling write caching in the preferences. That way it will always write everything when you tell it to. That way you dont need to "eject" the media.
In WinDoze XP SP2 you can access the device properties from the device manager, under "Disk Drives" - Find your device and right click to choose "Properties", then you can click on the "Policies" tab and tell it to optimize for fast removal...
I know its in a different place for Windoze 2k, but you will have to find it. You need to disable "Write Caching" then Presto! it will work like previously...
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
On my Belkin 128 MB usb dongle, I have a little jumper-slider (like seen on matrox video cards). This is a chip-based write-protect. Takes a paperclip to do, but your data isnt changeable in the least.