Flash drives aren't quite a dime a dozen, but it's pretty easy to amass a bunch of them in your office drawer. This guide helps you turn them into software-packed giveaway drives.


Many readers were curious about the giveaway flash drives in my laptop bag. Why give flash drives away? I found that despite only using a single flash drive, I had a drawer full of them in my office. Between promotional give-aways, lost or abandoned drives with no identifying information, and friends tossing their old small drives my way, I had quite a pile of them. Rather than let them rot into obsolescence, I pack them with software to give away to people. Whenever someone sees me using my flash drive on my laptop to run all sorts of programs, or someone expresses interest in the kind of stuff we write at Lifehacker, I've always got a few in my laptop bag to share.

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My approach to creating the drives is to create mock drives on my main computer. I have a folder for each of the smaller drive sizes, like 128MB, 256MB, and so on. All files for that size flash drive are stored in the folder, ready to be copied onto a drive. I aim to only use 50% or less of the capacity of the drive. This way the person who receives it won't have to clean house immediately to get some usable space for their own files. The list below is arranged in order of drives from smallest to largest. Each size includes the contents of the previous size, so Firefox, for instance, is on every drive size even though it only appears under 128MB; the largest drives contains everything on this list.

I include applications based on one of two reasons: Either the application is one I use on a daily basis and love (like Firefox and Everything), or the application is good enough for me to recommend it, even though I don't use it on a daily basis (such as Thunderbird). Every drive includes, in addition to the software listed below, a readme file with a basic explanation of the software's functionality and a link to the software's website. Without further delay, the lists!

128MB Drives

256MB Drives


512MB+ Drives

If you have a suggestion for an addition to the list of portable apps I include on my giveaway drives, sound off in the comments below; I'll try the software out and consider adding it to my next batch of giveaway drives.