portability

As the calendar starts shifting into the warm weather months, the call of the wild starts to beckon. No matter if this call is something that drives us forward back to nature or on to another city of steel and concrete, this lure often means only one thing: road trip. Nowadays, of course, it is easier than ever to stay in touch and also bring along all of our creature comforts. Usually however, that doesn't include the contents of the fridge.

The BaseCamp Portable Refrigerator/Freezer has a 42-quart capacity and plugs directly into an automobile accessory socket. Smart … Read more

Axantum's AxCrypt is a free, open-source file encryption utility that offers strong symmetric encryption combined with compression, Windows shell integration, and other features. AxCrypt2Go is a portable version of AxCrypt. Since it's a portable tool, it doesn't offer all of the full version's integrated features. Axantum recommends using the fully installed version of AxCrypt as your daily driver and running AxCrypt2Go from your USB flash drive when you need to encrypt or decrypt files when you're away from your main system.

Once you've extracted and saved the program, you can drag it anywhere and … Read more

Ever wonder why USB 3.0 hasn't really caught on? Most flash drives and external hard drives are still chugging along on USB 2.0, and most of the latest laptops have just one USB 3.0 port. Some have none at all. (I'm looking at you, brand-new Toshiba Satellite C655D-S5511.)

That's a shame, because in real-world tests, USB 3.0 has proven to be around 3.5 times faster than USB 2.0. That means a full-system backup that previously took an hour should get done in less than 20 minutes.

Maybe things will change now … Read more

Toshiba announced today that its Canvio 3.0 and Canvio Basics 3.0 portable hard drives now offer up to 1.5TB of storage space, the second largest capacity on the market for portable external hard drives.

These two drives both support USB 3.0 (and are compatible with USB 2.0). The Canvio 3.0 also comes in a very sleek-looking chassis and now includes software drivers to make Macs support the NTFS file system.

NTFS is the native file system of Windows in which the Canvio drives are preformatted and generally can only be read by Macs. The … Read more

You might be surprised at how many processes run in Windows, though maybe not if you find your system slowing down and even freezing during a processor-intensive task, even when you thought you'd closed everything. Certainly, with Bitsum's Process Lasso you have less of an excuse, since it displays practically everything that can be displayed about your system's running processes. More than that, Process Lasso lets you set priorities for individual processes, balancing the load on your CPU and system resources according to need. For example, the gaming mode prioritizes speed and display processes and can even … Read more

We think it's awfully exciting that, thanks to Internet radio, we can listen to music and news from anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. TapinRadio Portable is a simple Internet radio player that offers access to thousands of radio stations. Although it does work as a radio player, some of its most touted features -- including its ability to record streaming content -- have problems functioning.

At first glance, TapinRadio's interface is fairly straightforward, with menus across the top for File, Settings, Favorites, Stations, and Recording. Finding a station is a process of navigating through a … Read more

Retailer Brookstone will sell a portable fuel cell able to charge smartphones a dozen times before running out.

Fuel cell maker Lilliputian Systems today announced that Brookstone will be the first retailer to carry its portable USB power source, which will be sold under Brookstone's brand. The fuel cell device is about the size of a thick smartphone, and the lighter fluid-filled cartridges are about the same size as a cigarette lighter.

It's a big step forward both for Lilliputian Systems, a 10-year-old spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and for portable fuel cell technology in general. … Read more

Ultra File Search Lite Portable, which can be launched from a USB device, has the sole purpose of helping users find files quickly, a function that we believe it does very well.

The free software has a plain, business-like interface that, like its big brother, organizes search options in simple tabs at the top of the window. These four options give maximum flexibility, allowing you to find files with specific text or by file attributes such as date or size, and each tab allows you to expand the search functionality or narrow the possible results. Results were returned quickly in … Read more

We typically think of stopwatches as items that go on your wrist or in your pocket, but there's no reason you can't have a stopwatch on your desktop, too. Free Stopwatch Portable is a simple program that lets you take your stopwatch with you on a USB drive or other portable device. It doesn't have a ton of features, but it's not a bad choice if all you need is the ability to time something.

Free Stopwatch Portable has a plain but intuitive interface, with a large start button that turns into a stop button when … Read more