For ultimate portability, use your USB drive to run an alternate operating system such as Ubuntu. If you’ve never heard of Ubuntu, you might want to know that it was originally devised during a lightning round of Scrabble by a player who wanted to use up – well, you guessed it. Even Ukulele has only two of them and USB isn’t an acceptable word – just yet. Okay, you’re South African or a Geek or both, and you know that the Scrabble story is just another yarn from the ice-fishing house. In the Wiki story, Ubuntu is the philosophy of “humanity towards others,” which could be why the open-source OS was so named. In any case, you can run Ubuntu from a USB flash drive and that’s pretty cool if you’re an Ubuntu & USB fan. And if you’re not, use your USB drive for other things and tell us about it. We may send you a prize – but we also may not.

Running an alternate OS from a USB drive is a lifesaver for lots of people, especially those with Netbooks. Obviously, this depends on your specific life and what constitutes life saving to you. If you plan run an OS from your USB drive, you should know that when you put Ubuntu on your drive, it will erase the other files on that drive, so why not get a new USB drive just for this anyway? You’ll need to put the bootable Ubuntu files on your USB drive and this is easy or hard depending on your geek index. Or you could just save the space in your own brain andget someone else to install the bootable files on your personalized USB drive.