Tunes - Tuneflow

Windows only: Ketarin is a great thing for any traveling tech support worker, as it can easily keep a folder or USB drive full of installation packages up to date.

You just got a new iPod or other music player over the holidays, and your older iPod looks like Craigslist fodder. Here are at least 10 reasons to re-consider its worthiness.

Windows only: OpenOffice.org 3, the latest version of the free, open-source office suite, has gotten a full thumb drive packaging by the PortableApps.com team.

Windows only: OpenOffice.org 3, the latest version of the free, open-source office suite, has gotten a full thumb drive packaging by the PortableApps.com team.

Only around five percent of Lifehacker's visitors are using the open-source Linux operating system when they stop by, according to our traffic charts, and only one of our editors (ahem) is regularly using it every day.

USB Drives (for Windows systems): If you're the type who brings their USB flash-memory drive everywhere you go, yet often has to backtrack all the places you've been to find it, Flash Drive Reminder is definitely worth the download. The tiny app, and its auto-starting accompanying file, sit on your drive and activate whenever you've plugged it into a Windows system.

Windows only: Portable application Toucan backs up and syncs your data between two locations (like your hard drive and your USB drive). Weighing in at just over 4.10MB installed, Toucan offers several advanced backup and syncing settings, like incremental backup with compression (supporting 7-Zip format), portable drive variables, scripts and advanced rulesets.

These days, it only takes an increasingly-cheap USB thumb drive and a program like UNetbootin to create a portable Linux desktop you can run on any computer that can boot from a USB port. But check out the list of distributions UNetbootin can download and install—it's huge, and the names don't tell you much about which distro is best for on-the-go computing.