Now carry your desktop in your pocket

Why carry a bulky and vulnerable laptop just so that, you can work while on the move? What if all the applications sitting on your desktop PC can be carried on a tiny thumb drive and will look and feel, exactly like your home machine, when you plug the drive into any public PC where ever you go? It is the number one on the wish list of lakhs of mobile `road warriors'— engineers and executives who need to carry their computers with them all the time across States and continents.

But it is a wish, not easily realised: It is relatively simple to carry all one's files on portable storage devices — anything from pocket sized portable hard disk to the tiny Universal Serial Bus (USB) `thumb' drive, to an even memory card: the type you slot into a digital camera. But it has not been possible to carry the bulky applications you might like to use — office suites, photo editing software, presentation and animation tools — because in most cases these cannot be installed on additional portable devices without violating copyright.

Now Indian engineers, working for a Singapore start-up have created a solution that neatly sidesteps all such rights issues — and still enables one to carry almost all standard PC applications on a portable storage device and recreate one's home desktop environment on any PC anywhere.