Your Computer On Your Thumb Drive

Date Published: 28 September 2006

Your Computer On Your Thumb Drive

Something I’ve wanted for a while now is the ability to keep my computer, or at least my email and some other critical files, on a USB drive — the ultimate in “ultra-portable” — which I could then use from any computer. I’ve been considering VirtualPC for this but any reasonable VPC image with Windows, Office, etc. is upwards of 6GB and requires that VirtualPC be installed on the host machine to run (not to mention the system and memory requirements). So today I was pointed to MojoPac, which sounds like it might solve this problem.

From their site:

MojoPac is a technology that transforms your iPod or other USB storage device into a portable and private PC. Just install MojoPac on any device with a USB port, upload your applications and files, modify your user settings and environment preferences, and take it with you everywhere.

Every time you plug your MojoPac-enabled device into any Windows XP PC, MojoPac automatically launches your environment on the host PC. Your communications, music, games, applications, and files are all local and accessible. And when you unplug the MojoPac device, no trace is left behind – your information is not cached on the host PC.

Have you used MojoPac? How do you like it? Does it work as promised? It sounds like it’s a pretty cool technology, and the price is less than $50 so unless some folks tell me it’s total crap I think I might have to give it a try.

Steve Smith

About Ardalis

Software Architect

Steve is an experienced software architect and trainer, focusing on code quality and Domain-Driven Design with .NET.