Windows functionality on the go

134/512MB
Portable GAIM
Although the proliferation and popularity of MSN can be arguably attributed to its default inclusion in Windows and sysadmin’s apparent laziness in not removing it, other protocols can be nice too. Portable GAIM means you can chat the day away instead of doing proper work. Not that you shouldn’t be doing proper work.

161/512MB
VLC
You can’t trust a sysadmin to have installed all the codecs required to watch video, which unfortunately makes Media Player Classic a little useless. VideoLan Client should fill that gap by including embedded codecs -- just make sure its always kept up to date, and ensure to grab the zip download, not the installer .exe!

163/512MB
FreeDOS
The nasty admin has taken away our command line, robbing us of one of the most powerful ways to achieve things, let alone buck the system. Let’s put one back in by throwing FreeDOS on the drive. Grab the 1.44MB version from the latest distro folder, run command.com and you’re away -- you may have to download something like WinImage to extract it though, and you may want to refamiliarise yourself with the 8.1 DOS format. Of course this can be expanded with any other command line tool you care to use (try http://www.unxutils.sourceforge.net/ for starters), making it an immensely powerful thing to have portable.

164/512MB
F@H
When proteins in the body are carrying out tasks, they arrange themselves first -- this is known as folding. When a protein folds incorrectly, this can cause all sorts of diseases. Folding is still not completely understood, and so Folding @ Home was developed, a distributed application to help solve the problem, using CPUs all around the world. There’s even a team competition. While we don’t condone elicit ‘borging’ of machines, it’s always nice to be able to use the CPU cycles of the machine you’re currently using to crunch a WU. You could even add it to an autorun file so every time you insert your USB key in a machine, it starts up automatically.

165/512MB
SIW
System Information for Windows, in a single handy executable. Sometimes you just need to know the specs of a machine before you work on it, and there’s no way normally to pull the amount of information required – SIW is your saviour.

171/512MB
Putty + UltraVNC
Sometimes you just have to access your home machine, whether to check on your downloads, to grab an extra file that you forgot to bring with you or even just to check everything is still running smoothly. These two apps should help you do that – providing you’ve set up a VNC listener and SSH server on the other end, of course.