Using the Internet away from home can be an annoying experience. Despite the ubiquitous presence of Internet Explorer, you may still miss your favourites list and the other comforts of a home-trained browser. Thanks to one enterprising user, you can now take your browser with you wherever you go.

The Mozilla Firefox web browser is an excellent alternative to Internet Explorer, and this portable version of it will run completely from a USB key, so you can always have a familiar web surfing experience. Best of all, it takes up very little space on the USB drive itself, so there's no reason not to try it.

Simply download the latest file from here, unzip it to your USB drive and run the 'portablefirefox.exe' file from the device to start the browser.

All favourites are stored on the drive and travel with you. As you would expect, some compromises have been made to reduce wear and tear on USB drives; the browser does not keep a history or cache web pages, so browsing back through previously loaded pages will be slower than a 'regular' web browser, but we think that's a small price to pay for the benefits this package offers.

USB travel kit B) portable email client

If you thought the portable browser listed above was useful, how about having your email client with you at all times? All you need is Internet access and you can send and retrieve email at will from your own address book without compromising your security or privacy.

Thunderbird is Mozilla's email client counterpart to the Firefox browser. The same clever fellow responsible for the portable Firefox browser modification has also made this program portable. Again, installation is very simple. Download the latest version from here. Unzip the archive onto your USB drive.

Now run the 'portablethunderbird.exe' file to start the application. If you've used Outlook Express, Thunderbird should seem instantly familiar.

All your current addresses can be easily imported from Outlook Express or Outlook by going to 'tools\import' and selecting 'address books.' The same goes for your existing email folders. You can transplant your entire email system onto your flash drive if you'd like.

This is an excellent tool for the road warrior or student, as it makes communicating from the office, public computers or Internet cafes much, much easier.