Once upon a time, easy remote computing was a pipe dream, now people routinely carry gigs of data around on flash drives smaller than a modest pack of chewing gum. Manage your apps and data with these portable application suites.

Photo by basheertome.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite portable application suite with us. We’ve tallied the votes and now we’re back with the top five nominations for your review. A note on the reviews: portable applications suites usually contain dozens and dozens of individual applications. We’ll be unable to list every single one here and we urge you to visit the site of the suite to check out the full application list.

LiberKey (Windows, Free)

LiberKey doesn’t have the polished menu found in the PortableApps suite, but its menu is functional and conveniently arranged by program type. LiberKey opts to put things in categories labeled according to what they do, so even if you’ve never seen an application that is included in the LiberKey suite you’ll have a pretty good idea that it’s a Color Picker or Security Tool based on the folder you find it in. It’s a useful feature given that the Ultimate installation installs around 250 applications—you’re bound to see quite a few you’ve never used before.

PortableApps Suite (Windows, Free)

PortableApps is the Grand Daddy of portable application sites. Between John Haller—the founder of the site—and the dozens of developers, packagers, translators, and the hundreds of people that participate in the forums, the sheer number of people working to polish the PortableApps suite has resulted in a very comprehensive package. The PortableApps suite includes basics like Firefox for browsing and Pidgin for instant messaging but also includes—in the full package—Open Office. You could download all the individual portable components separately of course, but what really ties everything together is the PortableApps menu system. Seen in the screenshot above, the menu system is clean, includes a backup utility, and makes organizing your portable apps and documents simple.

Portable Linux (Free)

Many of you took the stance that running portable apps in Windows was great but way too restrictive. Booting a computer into a distinct operating system gives power users the ability to run the machine as their own without any risk to the native operating system on the machine. You can find dozens and dozens of Linux distributions which can be modified or tweaked to run off a portable drive. If you’re just getting started with using a LiveUSB version of Linux, however, we’d suggest taking a peak at one of our past features on portable Linux use: Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems—one of the contestants, Puppy Linux, is pictured in the screenshot above. If you want to get a sense the number of Live Linux versions out there, check out The LiveCD List here.

Geek.Menu (Windows, Free)

Geek.Menu is a branch in the PortableApps development tree. Geek.Menu uses the same convenient installation files from PortableApps.com that the original PortableApps suite uses. The layout is similar but Geek.Menu has several key enhancements—you can check them out here—like support for TrueCrypt, creation of categories within the menu structure, and automatic application execution on menu startup. You’ll note—from the screenshot above—that Geek.Menu doesn’t come preloaded with software. To get Geek.Menu off to a quick start you can download the PortableApps suite and swap out the menu systems.

Lupo PenSuite (Windows, Free)

Lupo PenSuite mashes up a familiar looking menu with a huge offering of applications. Taking a note from the LiberKey school of portable suite production, Lupo PenSuite throws everything at you but the kitchen sink. Need to tinker in the Windows Registry? Lupo PenSuite has 8 applications just for registry editing. You can check out the full app log at this link. If you’re looking for a suite that sports everything from a web browser to a DVD burner and everything in between including security tools and torrent clients, Lupo PenSuite has quite a list of offerings.

Windows only: Free portable application FolderSize quickly analyzes the contents of any hard drive or specific folder on your computer to help you hunt down your hard drive hogs and free up space.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

FolderSize is another in a relatively long line of similar tools (our favorite is the previously mentioned WinDirStat), but it boasts a couple of nice features that sets it apart from most.

First and foremost, it’s portable, which means it’s the perfect app to throw on your PC repair kit thumb drive. Second, where some of these tools can take a while to analyze your hard drive usage, FolderSize seems to run really fast and light. On the downside, it’s not as feature rich as most of the alternatives, and you can’t drill down through the results or even open folders in a new Explorer window from its interface. You can, however, zoom in and out on the window for a closer look at folders using your mouse’s scrollwheel.

If you’re going to do some serious file analysis where you can install something, I’d suggest going with WinDirStat. If you just need something fast you can carry on your thumb drive, this app seems like a good option. FolderSize is a free, open-source download, Windows only.

When Windows 7 drops this Thursday, you can either spend many, many hours watching a progress bar, or you can boot into a clean, speedy system with that new-OS smell. Let’s get your system set up for a proper Windows 7 upgrade.

If you’re jumping into Windows 7 for the first time this Thursday, or soon after, you won’t find yourself facing an entirely new-looking, strange-acting Windows. Most of Windows 7’s features are refinements, tweaks, and speed-ups from Vista. Your Lifehacker editors have been using 7 ever since the Windows 7 Beta dropped in January, and we’ve found a few things worth noting and, in some cases, crowing about, like these 10 things to look forward to in Windows 7, or Windows 7’s underhyped features.

Considering that we know that 86% of you are upgrading to Windows 7, we thought it might be worth a little guidance for getting ready to do just that.

Before You Upgrade, Part 1: What You Can Upgrade To

Are you running Windows XP? You can upgrade, but you’ll have to do a whole-cloth “custom” installation, which will either wipe out your current system or, if you’re planning on dual-booting, require some hard drive partitioning.

Running Windows Vista? You can do an in-place upgrade from a Vista edition (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate) to an equivalent or lower-scale edition of Windows 7 (Starter, Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate), assuming you’re not moving up from 32-bit to 64-bit. Yeah, it’s that simple. Ed Bott at ZDNet took a woefully confusing upgrade chart Microsoft prepared and made an easier-to-grasp, plain-English upgrade chart that’s definitely worth checking out.

Before you buy an upgrade disc, though, you’ll want to ensure your system meets the minimum specs for 7. Here they are in table form, stylishly cribbed from Wikipedia’s Windows 7 page:

Need to double-check one of your system’s stats against what Microsoft calls the bare minimum? They offer a free Upgrade Advisor download for Windows systems that will tell you whether your hardware and peripherals can live in the Windows 7 world.

Finally, if you’re planning on upgrading from the Release Candidate you’ve been testing out and running happily since what seems like forever, know that it takes a bit more than just popping in a disc. Microsoft doesn’t really want you to pay only an “upgrade” price to move up from a free system, but it can be done. Our own How-To Geek posted a detailed walkthrough of a Windows 7 RC to RTM upgrade at his home away from Lifehacker. Basically, you’ll need to edit a single file on the Windows 7 installation disc, which requires a disc-to-hard-drive copy and a free extraction tool. If that’s not your cup of tea, or you’d rather fulfill your licensing obligations, you’ve got until March 2010 before the Release Candidate starts nagging and auto-rebooting on you.

Before You Upgrade, Part 2: Back Up Your Data

Even if things go swimmingly with your upgrade, you’ll want to have a fall-back copy of your music, pictures, documents, application data, and other important files. If you’re doing a “custom installation” from Windows XP or any system without a Windows license, it’s an absolute must. Our readers voted up tools like Cobian Backup, SyncBack, and Acronis True Image in our Hive Five for Windows backup tools, but also suggested online, auto-monitoring tools like Mozy Home and Carbonite—which aren’t free for more than token amounts of data, and probably can’t get you backed up in time if you must jump into 7 this Thursday.

For absolute security in knowing that you could completely revive your current Windows system if 7 turned into a disaster, do what Gina did by hot-imaging your PC’s hard drive with DriveImage XML.

Upgrade Option 1: In-Place Upgrade from Vista

This one is the easiest option, since all your data files stay in place, your just-as-you-like-them computer settings stay in place, and you don’t need to touch anything with the word “partition” involved.

The downside? Depending on how “clean” a user you are—in terms of removing unnecessary applications and keeping your media library trim and in one place—and the speed of your hardware, an upgrade to Windows 7 can take a seriously long time. Chris Hernandez charts his extensive testing and finds that a “super user” on mid-range hardware could wait more than 6 hours for a 32-bit upgrade to finish. That’s a worst-case scenario, but if you feel like you’ve got a lot of applications and data that might hold things up, there is a way to get tidy in a jiff.

First off, install Revo Uninstaller and kill off any applications, helpers, monitoring programs, and anything else that you’re not really using in Vista. (Won’t it feel nice to have a cleaner system when you start up Windows 7?) Next, read our step-by-step guide to separating your data from Windows on a stand-alone partition. You’ll benefit from doing this with any version of Windows, and especially if you’re planning to dual-boot any time soon.

Separating your music, pictures, movies, Office documents, and other non-application files from the stuff Windows needs to run means that Windows 7 only looks at your core C: drive for an upgrade. From a peace of mind perspective, that also means that if things don’t go well with your upgrade and you decide to run a clean install, you’re in a better position to do so. Best of all, Windows 7’s “Libraries” features makes it easy to access music, pictures, documents, and videos anywhere on your system, right from the Start menu.

Upgrade Option 2: Upgrading from XP or a Clean Hard Drive

Windows XP users can still get the Upgrade price discount, but there’s no actual “upgrade”—you’re doing a whole new install of Windows 7 on a blank hard drive, or at least a blank partition. If there’s space enough on your drive, do as we suggest above and create a new partition for just your data, but you’ll also want to back up your application data in this case.

Microsoft has posted an official XP-to-Windows-7 migration video guide, and offers a User State Migration Tool that claims to capture desktop and system settings, user accounts, and the files you want and brings them over to your new Windows 7 system. The How-To Geek’s partner in blogging, mysticgeek, also details how to use Windows 7’s Easy Transfer tool with a USB drive to migrate files and settings. Obvious, but fair, warning: Be sure to run these transfer utilities in XP first, back up their file loads, and then run them in Windows 7, unless you’re planning on dual-booting (detailed just a bit down this page).

Concerned about your favorite programs’ compatibility in Windows 7? We’ve run down how to set up and use Virtual XP Mode in Windows 7. An official, final, and free download of XP Mode should arrive this week for Windows 7, possibly at this page.

Upgrade Option 3: Dual-Boot Windows XP or Vista with 7

Technically, you could use our guide to dual-booting Windows 7 with XP or Vista to set up a crazy schizo-system with all three Windows versions available, but we’re assuming that unless you’re a developer, you probably want to at least move on from Vista, given 7’s compatibility with, and improvements over, the much-maligned OS.

If you set up dual-booting, you can still use the User State Migration Tool or Windows 7’s Easy Transfer tool to save time setting up your accounts over again in Windows 7—you just don’t have to worry about putting the horse before the cart this way.

“Upgrade” Option 4: Boot Camp on a Mac

There’s nothing too new about installing Windows 7 on a Mac with Boot Camp that hasn’t already been done with XP and Vista. Stroll over to our Boot Camp how-to guide to read up on how to set up a Windows system right next to OS X, with extra pointers on getting devices like Mac keyboards working properly in Windows.

Upgrade Option 5: Load Windows 7 on a Netbook

It’s entirely possible to load Windows 7 onto netbooks that shipped with XP, Linux, or some other system—it’s just not quite easy. If you’re up for a little ISO imaging, USB installing, and file compression, our sibling blog Gizmodo can walk you through installing Windows 7 on almost any netbook. You’ll need a minimum of 1GB of RAM and 8GB of hard drive space on your netbook, along with a 4GB thumb drive and a valid copy of Windows 7. PC World just posted a guide to getting Windows 7 on your netbook in a half-hour, but we’ve yet to try out their technique.

After reporting on how thieves used Windows malware to steal sizable sums from small banks and businesses, a Washington Post reporter recommends a fairly air-tight solution for net banking: boot up Linux from a live CD or USB drive.

Brian Krebs notes that loading an OS like Ubuntu onto a USB drive or live CD isn’t just his unique solution—the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, among others, recommends conducting online financial transactions and monitoring from a computer that’s otherwise locked out of standard web browsing and email. By booting into a non-installed, use-once-and-reboot system like Ubuntu, you avoid both a litany of Windows malware and leaving anything behind.

Krebs offers a guide to loading and booting Ubuntu, while we’ve previously suggested using Fedora’s Windows-based installer and the easy-peasy uNetBootin to create USB drives, which move a little faster than a live CD and can still be used for data storage.

Fedora always offers a wide variety of downloads for each release, even betas, but if you’re looking for a simple live test of the new system, we’d recommend grabbing the Fedora Live USB Creator and downloading a Live CD ISO file to drop into it.

There’s far too much in the beta announcement to try and list here—and even more in the project wiki. Give Fedora 12 beta a try, and if you’re a fan, tell us what sets Red Hat’s consumer OS apart from the competition in the comments.

All platforms: The more stable, heavily bug-fixed Release Candidate of Ubuntu 9.10 is available for download, for anyone already using the beta or who can’t wait 6 more days to see how the Linux OS looks and feels.

The RC release doesn’t have much new in the way of features beyond what we saw in the beta, but Ubuntu’s team has been working hard on papercut-type annoyances throughout the system. If you’ve already downloaded the beta, hit the link to find upgrade instructions, and newcomers can grab a torrent or direct download of an ISO to boot from. It is, of course, a free download that runs on most any platform.

This post can be fairly short because Ninite works exactly as advertised. Head to Ninite’s web site, check off the free downloads you want from each category, grab the custom installer download that it serves up, and run it. Ninite runs through each installation with an absolute minimum of pop-up questions—none of them, in face, with most installs—and then it’s done.

The selection is pretty great, too, with many of the must-have apps we’ve fawned over in the past like VLC, Audacity, IrfanView, Paint.Net, uTorrent, and many more.

Ninite’s installers are free downloads for Windows systems only.

Ack! The computer ate my term paper! We’ve all been there at some point. You delete an important file, somehow it skips your Recycle Bin altogether, and for all practical purposes, it’s disappeared into the ether. But before you hit the big red panic button, there’s a very good chance that your file is still alive and kicking somewhere on your hard drive—you just need to know how to find it. With the right tools, finding and recovering that deleted file can be as simple as a few clicks of your mouse.

Part I: The Overview

Ok, so you’ve lost an important file. Don’t panic. Take a breath, and let’s see if we can find it. Before you go into full-on file recovery mode, make sure you double-check the folder you had saved it in and the Recycle Bin or Trash. Still nothing?

1. Stop What You’re Doing

When your operating system deletes a file, all it really does is mark the space on your hard drive that your file occupies as free space. It’s still there, but your computer is now perfectly happy to write new data on top of it—at which point the file recovery process becomes a lot more difficult. That means you should do as little computing as possible until you find the file you’re looking for, since every time you save a new file—every time your computer writes information to your hard drive—your chances of recovering the file go down.

2. Find the Right File Recovery Program

Windows: You’ve a lot of really great freeware options for file recovery if you’re running Windows. Notable apps include Undelete Plus (original post), PC Inspector File Recovery (original post), and Restoration (original post). Undelete Plus is the most user-friendly option of the bunch, with advanced filtering options that make it easy to find your needle of a file among the haystack of deleted garbage, but in my tests I found both Restoration and PC Inspector File Recovery to be more effective at recovering files. (Of course, your mileage may vary.) As an added bonus, the bare bones Restoration is portable, which makes it an excellent addition to your thumb drive.

UPDATE: Per several readers advice, you may also want to check out Recuva (original post), another freeware Windows file recovery tool.

Mac: If you’re on a Mac and aren’t afraid to lay down a few bucks in the name of data recovery, the $99 Data Rescue II is the go-to application for file recovery with a friendly graphical interface.

All Platforms: If you’re not afraid to crack open a terminal window or command prompt, the free, cross-platform command-line tool PhotoRec (original post) is a crack shot at recovering photos (as the name implies) as well as virtually any other file type from your removable media or hard drives.

3. Recover Your Files

Once you’ve picked a tool, it’s time to scan your hard drive for your lost file or files. This process varies depending on the app you’re using, but it’s basically the same for all of them: Just point the program at the hard drive or folder that was holding your missing file and start your scan. Once the scan is complete, you’re going to see a big list of jumbled file names. Often most of these files are nothing more than system files that your operating system has created in the course of basic operation, and you won’t need to worry about them. You’re just looking for the file type and name that matches what you’ve lost.

Once you find what you’re looking for, saving it is a matter of right-clicking the file and choosing where to save it.

Went through steps one through three and still aren’t having any luck? It might be worth trying again with a different application, since there can be a lot of variation between apps. If you’re still not having any luck, part two discusses a few other ways you can try addressing more specific problems when your data goes missing.

Part 2: More Specific Problems

Above you got a basic overview for recovering deleted files from your computer. Now we’ll take a closer look at some more specific problems, methods of data recovery, and tools that may be of help in your quest for your elusive lost data.

Recover Files from a Wiped or Unbootable Hard Drive

So you didn’t just accidentally delete a file or two and empty your Recycle Bin prematurely—instead you’ve got a whole hard drive worth of missing data. You can still use many of the applications mentioned above to recover files from these drives as long as you have or can get the hard drive into a bootable computer. For more details, check out how to recover files from a wiped hard drive with PhotoRec (original post) or how to recover data from a crashed hard drive with PC Inspector File Recovery (original post).

If you can’t or don’t know how to get your unbootable drive into another computer, a Linux live CD can be perfect for rescuing files. If the Linux route scares you off, give the popular BartPE (original post) a try.

Finally, if none of these options can even read your hard drive, you still might be able to get it working for just long enough with a few tricks of the data recovery trade, like putting the busted hard drive in the freezer.

Recover Lost Photos

If you need to resurrect photos from a damaged flash memory card from your digital camera, you’ll be happy to know that most of the applications listed in part one above will do the trick—you just need plug in your camera or insert the card into your computer’s card reader before running your data recovery application of choice. That said, you can find other applications, like Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery (original post), that are focused specifically on image recovery that you may want to add to your data recovery toolbox.

Recover Lost Word Documents

If your lost dissertation was saved as a Word document, you’ve got a few more interesting options for getting to your lost or deleted documents—read more about them here and here.

Recover Data from Scratched or Corrupted CDs and DVDs

If your munged data is sitting on optical media like a CD or DVD, the recovery process can be slightly different. Freeware application CD Recovery Toolbox (original post) is made specifically to read the portions of a CD that are readable in an effort to rescue as much data as possible from a damaged disc. If that doesn’t work, you may want to give a look at the 30-day trial of shareware application CDCheck, as recommended by a reader. Then again, if scratches are the issue, you may be able to get away with simply fixing your scratched CD or DVD yourself.

Part 3: Don’t Let This Happen Again

Whatever the cause of your lost file, the best method of data recovery is a good preemptive data backup plan. If you’re on Windows, we’ve taken you step-by-step through how to automatically back up your hard drive so that this sort of thing never happens again. If you’re running a Mac, do yourself a favor: Get an external hard drive and flip the switch on the easy-to-use Time Machine. Linux users should check out backup options like FlyBack, TimeVault, or the time-honored rsync.

Download Page:

http://www.getmiro.com/