My bag has been a semi-permanent home to a couple of pendrives since I finally managed to replace my detested floppy discs. Little did I know I haven’t really been using them to their full potential…

They can be used for a lot more than storage, something I always kind of guessed but for whatever reason never really got around to experimenting with. A few days ago I set about creating my self titled “Pendrive of Gold”, it’s nothing completely mind blowing but it certainly improves my productivity, especially when I’m away from home.

First off I finally got around to trying the (relatively) new functionality on the Xbox 360 which allows you to format a normal pendrive for profile and data storage. It’s something that’s been a long time coming, there was no way I was going buy one of the Microsoft rip off sticks so this is certainly a breath of fresh air.

To set it up you go to the ‘My Xbox’ tab, scroll to far right for ‘System Settings’, give it some green (translates to clicking A, apologies for the appalling attempt at speaking gangster) then head on down to memory followed by your memory stick (you did plug it in didn’t you?). I wanted to use my pendrive for more than just my Xbox so selected customise and chose the smallest option (if you want to store game saves etc you may want to go bigger).

You should now be able to move your profile across to the pendrive (System Settings -> Memory -> Hard drive -> Gamer Profiles -> Select desired profile -> Move) along with any saved game etc that you want.

Fantastic, now what? Well a cheeky Google led me to portableapps.com. They’ve got a plethora of applications you may want to carry around with you including Pidgin, Google Chrome and Skype, all set up and ready to be installed onto your pendrive.

The beauty about it is that, as well as having your favourite programs available to you on any Windows computer, it keeps all of your personal settings. We’re talking Chrome applications and web history, media players with proper codecs and even obscure plugins for instant messengers so they can access Facebook chat.

As you’d expect these programs don’t run as well as they would off a hard drive but I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe not for everyday use but certainly worthwhile if you’re going to be borrowing someone’s computer every so often.

Naturally you’re also going to want to create a new directory called ‘data’ or something equally descriptive to retain your pendrive’s usual functionality and you’re done, well almost. If you’re nerdy like me you might also want to change the icon and name that’s displayed in My Computer.

This is done by creating an autorun.inf file in the root directory of your pendrive The code for mine follows, simply edit the information to suit your needs in notepad and save it as autorun.inf. Your icon will be for whatever program you point at (remember that you can change programs icons).

[autorun]
open=PortableApps/GoogleChromePortable/GoogleChromePortable.exe
action=Contains everything imaginable
icon=PortableApps/GoogleChromePortable/GoogleChromePortable.exe
label=Pendrive of Gold

Hope you found that interesting, I certainly think it’s a good addition to my tech arsenal. If you’ve got any other tips to help my expand my ultimate pen drive do let me know below.