Portable software refers to programs that can be stored onto a media (such as USB drives, CDs, external harddisks etc.) and run directly from there on multiple computers. In other words, software that you can move from one computer to another without the need to re-install.
There are a lot of sites that provide such software for download. Google for “portable software” in general, or, say for “portable firefox” in particular. My favourite portable apps are the GIMP, and portable FileZilla (a GUI FTP tool).
Cygwin is a Linux like environment for Windows. It can run within Windows and access the filesystem. Its very useful to people like me who need Windows as the main OS, but need to test Linux shell scripts and other utilities. I even have a portable version of Cygwin, created based on these instructions. In fact, I was able to improve the procedure slightly. If someone needs help, please contact me through comments. I want to upload the ISO of the DVD created – if someone can provide the bandwidth and hosting space, I can mail a copy of the DVD to him.
