Last post I was singing the praises of the Lifehacker blog, and you were probably going, “Yadda yadda yadda, I could care less.” If you were, thank you. You’ve just handed me my next Lightning/Bug post (it’s couldn’t! Couldn’t care less!). Anyway, you don’t have to care less, more, or at all, but just in case you’re mildly interested, here’s how my own experiment with their “carry your life on a USB thumb drive” tip went.

It’s not something I usually think about, because I have a laptop which lacks for nothing a desktop computer might do. At least, nothing that I’d ask a desktop compture to do. So my life is already pretty portable.

But then my laptop got a two-week all-expense-paid vacation to Dell’s repair shop (hooray for warranties), and I didn’t have a modern laptop anymore. The tip began to look mighty useful for hopping from the home desktop to the office desktop to my husband’s laptop to who knows where.

Here’s what I put on my 1GB Lexar Firefly thumb drive. It all fit, and it’s all free:

• Portable Thunderbird
• Portable Firefox
• Portable GIMP (image manipulation)
• Portable ClamWin (antivirus)

All of the above courtesy Portable Apps, who win an internet.

I have also done a couple other important things with this thumb drive. Following the tips of people commenting on the thread, I’ve created a Reward_If_Found.txt file with my contact info and the offer of dinner and a movie to enable nice people to return my lost property, should it be lost. This textfile can be made to pop up and “cry for help” via an autoplay script, but I haven’t done that yet. I’ve also relabelled the drive with my phone number. And just in case it gets lost and the person who finds it isn’t so nice, I’ve created a master password on Firefox to protect the passwords it remembers for me.

I’ve had relatively few issues working off the thumb drive. Primarily, Firefox can be a little laggy; this is most notable when loading a large page or typing into a blog comment form. Also, I have a tendency to forget I’m running off the thumb drive sometimes. Yanking it down doesn’t cause Firefox to shut down immediately, but it will shut down soon after. And there’s just nothing like restoring a Firefox session into a blog post editing session, hitting “save changes,” and realizing you’ve just written over your progress so far with the older version of the text in Firefox’s saved session. Whee!

Now that my Dell Inspiron is back in my hands, I’ve got a dilemma. I love the flexibility of being able to work off the thumb drive. But advantages such as program speed, a USB port, and the ability to yank the thumb drive whenever I want are things I’m reluctant to sacrifice for that flexibility, especially considering I’d so rarely take advantage of it. So I was pleased to see this post show up at Lifehacker. The tip involves a Microsoft web app, FolderShare, which is supposed to sync “almost all of your profile data” across two or more computers. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite what I’m looking for. I just need a smart little script that will compare the last-modified dates of the profiles on the thumb drive and the host computer, and push the most recent version to overwrite the older. And that’s not what FolderSync does, not quite.

I suppose, for now, the best solution for me is, well, me–dragging and dropping my profiles directory from the Portable Firefox installation on my thumb drive to the one on my laptop and back again. Or just working off the thumb drive, which isn’t all that painful, really.

So this tip gets eight out of ten stars from me. I’ve only been working with it for about a week now, though. Stay tuned for sudden epiphanies and earth-shattering discoveries at some undetermined future date.