We have work to do and we have places to go for completing those tasks. So it is an obvious necessity to carry your working tools along. If that means digital documents, our USB drives comes to rescue. And very recently, the dominance of portable tools has also made the job a lot more easier, but wouldn’t it be nice, if you could simply insert your USB drive, start a single app and then all other documents and tools (on your USB drive) could be opened as easily as opening the Widows start menu? Or what if there is a built-in antivirus and disk maintenance tool ? Isn’t that a lot more safer and easier? CodySafe is one such free tool that does all of them.

CodySafe is a menu app for Portable Applications. This software tool turns any portable drive from a simple data carrier to a computer-on-stick. You can easily organize all your portable applications into a menu where you can access it quickly and easily.

Configure CodySafe USB Drive

  1. Download the portable tool CodySafe. Its only 2.08 Mb in size and pretty light-weight too.

  2. Insert the drive in the USB port and double-click the application file, to install the app. Follow the guidelines, as instructed during the installation. I would recommend you to select all the tools when prompted to choose.

  3. The setup will automatically locate your drive and will ask you to proceed. If you have multiple drives inserted, then please choose the appropriate drive where you want to install CodySafe and proceed.

  4. In the final step of installation you will get an option to give your newly created CodySafe Drive a name (optional). Try something new. Press Finish, when done.

Add Programs to Codysafe Dock

Now that you are done installing the CodySafe, you will find an icon in the Windows tray. Click on it and you will see a dock opening. This is the CodySafe Dock. It looks somewhat like the Windows Start Menu. Its empty at the start. Let me show how to fill it up.

I’ll be adding a portable Chromium Browser for demonstrating. Download the portable app and copy the whole pack to a folder named “Program Files” in my USB drive’s root directory.

  1. Start CodySafe by clicking its tray icon. As the dock opens, press “Options”.

  2. In the Control Panel, click on the section named “Applications Manager”.

  3. Now as it opens, go to the tab, “Add Application” and locate the application(chrome.exe) within your USB drive. Use the “Browse” button. Now press the “Apply” button to save the changes.

  4. In the “Application Management” tab you can manage your applications. You can also configure CodySafe to auto-start some applications. You can add those in the “Autorun Management” tab.

Others Things Worth Noting :

Find If Lost :

This is a useful feature that creates and saves your identity information in the USB drive as a readme.txt file. So, in case, you have lost your storage device and if someone have found it, they will get to know about its ownership. The Codyssey team (CodySafe developers) offers bounty to the person if he/she returns the drive to you. Well, I do not know, how good this works in reality, but I must say, its obviously a nice initiative.

Disk Doctor :

We are all aware of the fact that, USB drives most generally get infected by some common viruses like, conficker, backdoor trojan etc. This Disk doctor is nice addition to the CodySafe suite which prevents such intrusions. But this is not all, apart from virus protection (ViruSense) it also offers disk diagnosis tools that performs disk check and also attempts for recovery of data from bad sectors if found any.

Soumen is the founder/author for Ampercent, a tech blog that writes on computer tricks, free online tools & software guides.

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