Take your most important apps around on a USB stick. Most of these are available from http://portableapps.com. Here are the ones I use.

• OpenOffice – Office Suite and line-art design tools
• FireZilla – FTP
• Nvu – Web page editor
• Firefox – Web browser
• LockNote – Encrypt a text file (to store passwords, etc.)
• PSPad – Text Editor
• PStart – App Launcher
• Gimp – Image editor
• MySQL-Front — MySQL database tool. I use the old, open-source version; there is a newer commercial version here. A good server-side alternative is phpMyAdmin.

Additional portable apps, including games, can be found here.