Launchy is the Windows version of Mac’s QuickSilver. It is free and open source (naturally) and a flexible and relatively lightweight alternative to using Windows Start Menu.

By pressing the hotkey (Alt-Space), you bring up Launchy’s main window and type what you want. A quick type of “fire” brings up your most used entry of “firefox” but doesn’t stop there.  If you have other programs (in this example, Fire Antivirus, SoftFire screensaver or Fire and Motion), it will display them as well since it contains the keyword you typed.

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Ady Romantika has so kindly packaged Pidgin into a nice portable package called PidginPortable for use on USB drives. Take your contacts, log files and conversation on-the-go leaving no trace behind on the computer you use. (I highly recommend the rest of the PortableApps as well.)

Included in his package in addition to Pidgin (the free, open-source, ad-free Instant Messenger client we’ve all grown to love) are the following features:

• Spell check support. Aspell is included with EN dictionary as an example. If you don’t need spell checking support simply delete the contents of the App\Aspell folder and you’ll save 5MB+ of space.
• Off-the-Record Messaging plugin support. Files located in App\Pidgin\plugins\ folder, as otr_*.exe and pidgin-otr.dll
• Included a gtkrc file for CTRL-ENTER key binding when sending messages.

In addition to that, Ady also recommends my custom smileys theme for Pidgin, ForumSmileys.

XAMPP (eXtendable Apache MySQL PHP Perl, I think) is a quick and easy package for portable web development. It’s main purpose is to be an easy-to-install distribution for developers to get into the world of Apache. To make it convenient for developers XAMPP is configured with all features turned on. Just install one package to get a complete website back-end in minutes.

The default configuration includes the latest versions of the following:

• Apache - The base webserver
• SSL - SSL so you can browse via https://
• MySQL - Database backend
• PHP - Server-side scripting
• phpMyAdmin - Simple web based interface for managing the database

In addition to the defaults, the package includes many other additions, such as mod_rewrite, that just need to be enabled via a config file change.

The windows version is also built as a lite package which does not need to be setup! Just copy to your portable thumb drive and go!