MojoPac 2.0 was released last week. Since it had been quite some time since I last played with the previous version I grabbed the 2.0 version (free) this weekend for a quick spin.
First impression? Probably the same as the first time I played with it: This is so cool! Your complete environment on a USB device (iPod, USB stick, USB drive, etc.) and ready to go with any XP machine.
Second impression? The toolbar is no longer so painfully jarring and (dare I say?) ugly. It can be configured to auto-hide and no longer needs to be full width of the screen as well. While purely cosmetic, I found it a huge improvement over the old bar.
First snag? I had to turn on Write caching for my USB drive. Without the performance was just dismal… Literally, I couldn’t run a browser without bring reduced to tears.
However, here’s a weird note. I was going to take some screen shots to show folks how to turn on write caching. Oddly enough, my drive no longer has that enabled, yet performance is still solid. How it got disabled and if that was really my initial performance problem will be a mystery for the time being…
I had good luck installing a wide variety of apps in my MojoPac machine, but Windows Live Writer (my preferred blogging client) refused to install with some odd looking COM errors… That kinda killed my initial idea of building a little portable blogging machine.
From a gee whiz and fun factor MojoPac really is quite cool. And if you can count on having XP machines in Admin mode wherever you go, it is probably worth a look (read that sentence carefully. XP and Admin). There’s a Vista version in beta, but I don’t know if that means Vista or XP or if they will be two separate programs. At the end of the day, MojoPac just isn’t something I see myself using frequently.
[hat tip jkOnTheRun]
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November 3rd, 2008 
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