A Laptop in Your Pocket

Wow... The minimalists are winning the war against laptop weights and sizes. As facilitators, we use to lug lots of weights and space for our laptop and its accouterments---only to discover that the training venues’ laptops are even better than what we have. But we tried several solutions before. We placed all our data in one flash drive and use the laptop available on-site. We also deposited our files in a remote internet site and downloaded them when we are on-site. But really, the feel and experience are not the same. We still longed for our original working environment.

Now, how about the idea of cloning and then placing your entire desktop computing environment on your portables like your iPods, USB flash drives, external hard drives, USB-enabled cell phones, and USB-enabled digital cameras. Wow, this is certainly a welcome change! What do you need to achieve to achieve this? RingCube Technologies introduce the MojoPac that supports popular applications such as Firefox, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and other popular games.

MojoPac works even if any on-site laptop does not have the required software. This is the advantage of cloning your working environment in a USB so you can just plug it in. Moreover, it will use the resources of its host laptop but will save all the changes you made on your USB drive. No modifications are made on the host laptop either. You can view a demo on how to run MojoPac here.

To setup the MojoPac, you need to download and run the installer and select a USB device attached to your laptop, whose working environment you like to clone. Once installed, MojoPac creates an executable in the root of that device along with an autorun file that gives the user the option of starting the MojoPac environment automatically when the device is plugged in. Once this application is started, a new Windows Desktop (with its own wallpaper, icons, shell, etc.) is started up in the virtualized MojoPac environment. Any application that runs inside this environment runs off the USB device without affecting the file system of the host laptop. You can watch this video to learn more.

You can install most applications on the portable storage device by simply running the installer inside this environment. You can switch between the host environment and the MojoPac environment via the MojoBar at the top of the screen. When you are done with the applications, you can just exit out of MojoPac and eject the USB device. To run the applications on a different laptop, you do not need to reinstall the application. All your settings, applications, and documents function the same irrespective of which laptop the portable storage device is connected to.