Top 10 Portable Apps for SCADA System Integrator
For the generations who have been through the DOS and Windows 3.11 era, they must not have forgotten the good old days that they could easily copy a program around without caring about the installation file, but they were struggling on squeezing files into the fragile floppy disks instead. Now that we have a memory stick or USB/thumb drive that can carry giga bytes of data, but most of the program nowadays will require installation that have lots of dependency on Windows system files or other files at different directories, which made the programs no longer portable.
Thanks to the PortableApps.com we can now enjoy the similar portability again and yet on large capacity of storage. It’s extremely useful for System Integrators as they need to work across different system. The beauty of PortableApps is you could add any well written application into the portable app directory. Alternatively, there’s another simpler version of Portable Start Menu. Below are 10 applications in alphabetical order that are very useful when working at site.
- 7zip
Is there any need of other file compressing software? 7zip produced faster and smaller file compression, especially in 7zip format. - Free Download Manager
The Internet connection at site might be weak, you may need a sophisticated downloading tool to fight for every byte of the bandwidth. Free Download Manager is not packaged in PortableApps, but you can easily create one by clicking on the File menu and select Create Portable Version.
- Free File Sync
Free File Sync is a very fast and efficient tool to synchronize two directories for backing up or merging purpose. Although Free File Sync is not packaged in PortableApps, but you could simply copy the whole directory from Program Files and put them into your portable disk and then uninstall it from your system. - Mozilla Thunderbird
S.I. should be conservative and defensive, so that is why Thunderbird is the choice. Generally, desktop mail client provides a mean to view mail archive during offline session, which is a likely condition at site. Or, it’s a efficient way to send/receive mail over poor Internet connection. - Mozilla Firefox
When there’s any need/chance of using Internet Browser to search for information in limited time at site, you will want to use a browser with setting that you used to. And you don’t want to leave any personal information behind.
Other than Firefox, there are another two popular portable browsers that come later, namely Google Chrome and Opera. - Notepad Plus Plus
We are not aware of any other better text editor especially for engineering purpose. - Libre Office
In any case that you need to open up a spreadsheet for calculation, or if your company service report is written in ODT format. Note that Libre Office is the successor of Open Office, or you can simply assume it as the upgraded version of Open Office. - Team Viewer
This requires no further explanation. - WinDirStat
Over the times, very often database system at site may encountered hard disk space constrain due to some large temporarily files that copied/installed onto it during project execution stage. It can be tricky to find out if it was installed or stored by other system integrator. WindDirStat could come to rescue to help finding out which directories are containing files that occupying precious space unnecessarily. - WinMerge
WinMerge is not just for programmer, many engineering programs’ configuration may require text file to be edited. And WinMerge is an extremely useful tool to help identify the differences between files or even directories.
