MojoPac: Making Your Personal PC Portable When Is a Windows PC Not Really a Windows PC? Joseph Moran
When is a Windows PC not really a Windows PC? When it's MojoPac from RingCube Technologies, Inc. With MojoPac and a USB-based storage device, you can carry both data and applications around with you and access them on any Windows XP system, without using the "host" system's hard drive or leaving any user information behind. Perhaps the best way to describe MojoPac is as an "external user profile" that's portable and exists outside the confines of a specific computer.
The MojoPac software will only run under Windows XP, and it should work with any USB-based storage device that can appear as a drive letter to the operating system. The most obvious candidates for MojoPac installation are portable hard drives or flash memory drives, but you can install it on an iPod or other music player or even on a mobile phone that has sufficient storage.
What is exactly sufficient storage, you ask? Well, that largely depends on how many applications and how much data you want your MojoPac to contain. The minimum requirement is a 512MB Flash drive, but unless you'll only need basic tasks like browsing or instant messaging, you'll be better off using a device with a storage capacity measured in gigabytes. For example, if you have a 1GB Outlook .PST file, you need to consider that (as well as the amount of space consumed by Microsoft Outlook or Office) when choosing a storage device for use with MojoPac. (In testing, we used MojoPac with an ultra-portable 4 GB Imation Microdrive.)
Setup
After copying the MojoPac executable to your storage device and running it, the first step is to create a user account and password for device access. This password protection is the extent of the security built into MojoPac, so if privacy is a major concern, the company recommends using a storage device with built-in encryption (or biometric authentication) or using a third-party utility to safeguard personal data.
The next step is to specify which data and settings you want to copy over from the Host PC. You can include the contents of the My Documents folder (or any of its various sub-folders — Pictures, Music, Video, etc.) and specify additional folders or individual files to copy. (You can also migrate bookmarks, history, and settings for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.) You're helpfully shown how much of your device's capacity will be used as you select and deselect data.
The MojoPac transfer process copies data only – not applications. Therefore, you'll need to have your application installation files handy so that once you log in to your device you can install needed software into the MojoPac environment. Although MojoPac will let you use removable media drives (e.g. Flash memory or optical) on the host PC, you can't access any of the system's hard drives (including those connected via USB). As a result, any application you have that's not on CD/DVD must be copied to the MojoPac device via Windows Explorer. (If you look at the contents of your MojoPac storage device after installing the software, you'll see a standard Windows folder structure — Program Files, Documents and Settings, etc.)
