Maybe windows could have a portable mode function or a portable guest account meaning that when you turn it on, you have to plug in your portable ext harddrive and windows would then act as if c drive don't exists and treat the portable like system drive. Now when you try to update your browser, it will update somewhere on c drive, that you have to find and move to portable, and sometimes updates won't install, because they require admin rights, which shouldn't be nessecary for a portable installation. Many games also save data to c drive, so before and after play you have to move them to portable drive.

Now Windows 8 has the function called Windows To Go which can install Windows 8 on a USB device. The user could use the USB device to boot their system. More detail, you can refer: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/6991.windows-to-go-step-by-step.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831833.aspx Regards, Leo HuangLeo Huang TechNet Community Support

I don't know whether Internet Explorer exists in a portable edition, but with firefox I can set my portable device to autolaunch it on insertion, and when the browser opens it can reopen the exact same pages as last - email and other often used sites; very useful. Another example is SMPlayer which for simple reasons are 10 times better than WMP: - It connects to an online database, where you can download/upload subtitles to any kind of file (music, movie, homemade) in several languages - You do not need equalizer to adjust sound that in some plays might be too low, because it has a filter (normalize volume) - When you open the application, it remembers your last played files, plus settings and opens where last finished.