There are so many reasons I always keep a number of pendrive USB sticks with me all the time – to have a bootable Linux on pendrive so that I can always boot into Linux on any computer even if the installed operating system of that computer is not working, to keep my important files, passwords & documents, and finally to always have some of my favorite programs at hand in their portable versions.
If you also want to carry your favorite portable programs on a USB stick, then you can make use of PStart which is a portable apps launcher for Windows. It makes it very convenient to launch all those portable programs placed in various folders on your pendrive storage. You can add shortcuts to all of your programs in the PStart menu and then you can launch them quickly from PStart menu. Now instead of opening all those folders to launch a portable program, you can launch it from PStart menu.
In order to add the portable programs to PStart, you can follow two approaches. In the first method, you can right-click on the PStart window and choose to add a file. You will have to manually pick the program executable and add its description before its shortcut is added. In the second and much easier method, you can simple select File → Scan for executable and then select the folder or drive that contains all the portable programs. It will automatically scan all the programs available and add them to the PStart menu.
From within the PStart interface, you can also create an autostart file (autorun.inf) that auto-launches PStart as soon as insert your USB pendrive in a Windows PC. But since “autorun.inf” is pretty much disabled in the modern versions of Windows, this might not work.
The developer of PStart gives a list of all the websites from where portable applications can be downloaded for your pendrive portable apps collection. But you can simply search for portable apps online and you will find thousands of very useful application for free download.
You can download PStart apps launcher from http://pegtop.de/download.php.