Gadget User Blog

Another fascinating development on the topic of portable applications is the emergence of Mojopac. Now this isn’t only a portable applications pack, it’s a portable operating system pack. That’s right, you can now take your mojo anywhere you choose and run your USB portable drive or even memory stick with its own Windows XP operating system on it.

It’s very similar to other offerings in the Linux world such as Puppy Linux (more on that later). This mojo pack really does seem to work. I loaded it into a USB stick, plugged the stick into my computer and voila, I can run Windows XP from the stick. Of course it is a little slower, but not annoyingly slow.

I even loaded a couple of applications like OpenOffice and MindManager and they worked flawlessly. It is a really useful idea. Mojopac comes in a Freedom flavour and a Pro Flavour, the former being free and the latter comes at a cost but with more configuration possibilities.

So for those who like to travel light, you can now take a slimmed down version of your PC with you on portable drive or USB stick. With a high storage portable drive you may well have a virtual computer with you - I haven’t tried it with such a device yet, but it is the recommended option.

Once programs are loaded your device is listed as C drive on the host computer, and is the only accessible storage. You can however switch back to the host computers operating system at any time which makes transferring files to the USB stick reasonably painless.

Networked drives are not available from the device running Mojopac but DVD drives and so forth are. Mojopac is also kind enough to alert you when a popup appears on the host computer so you can switch back to take care of business if necessary.

Mojopac would be a useful solution for those who like a particular software that can’t be used at the office or on a public PC. You can now take that application with you wherever you go. It may not work with all software, I haven’t had time to try everything, but it does seem very robust and emulates an operating system very well (if that is indeed what it is doing - who know, I don’t understand the technicalities of it all!).

So there’s another string in the bow of portable computing. GUB will be watching this area with interest.