Stickies can be used as a portable application - meaning that the program and data files can be stored on a removable device (a HDD, pen drive, USB key or similar) and run on any machine it's connected to.

"Out of the box", Stickies stores all its information in your Windows 2000/XP/Vista user profile. The exact place can be seen by opening the About box - right click the task-tray icon and choose About:

However, when Stickies starts, it first checks the directory in which the Executable lives for the file stickies.ini. This will be where you installed Stickies - more than likely "c:\program files\stickies". If it find the stickies.ini file there, rather than use your profile, it will read all data from, and store all data to this place.

There are some more details on exactly the process Stickies goes through at startup with regard to directories in the "Directory Usage" page in the help file. Click any sticky and press F1 to call that up.

Making Stickies a portable application

• Open two folders in Windows Explorer:
  • c:\program files\stickies
  • The directory from the About box above
• Exit Stickies
• Create a folder on your pen drive called stickies (or anything else you prefer)
• Copy into this folder:
  • stickies.exe (required)
  • stickies.chm (optional - the help file)
  • shook70.dll (optional - the keyboard hook file)
  • stickies.ini (required - your data file)
  • store.mdb (required - this contains your stored stickies)
  • 'images' folder (required - this contains your images)

The folder will now look like this:

Now when you run the stickies.exe file from whichever machine you plug your pen drive into, the same data will follow you around.

Warning: it's a very good idea to close Stickies before you remove your pen drive. Not only for stickies.ini, as this is written to periodically, but also for stickies.mdb which is held open by Stickies all the time the application is running.

Also be aware that if you position a sticky to the bottom or right of your screen, then start Stickies on a screen with a lower resolution, the sticky may not be visible. If this happens, use the Rescue Offscreen menu option to bring it back.

April 2008

Jacob Mastel suggests that you might like to use Shortcut Creator 4U3 to help better use Stickies with the U3 system

You could also download his repackaged version of Stickies 6 below:

Download kb00002a.zip (842k)

Devo has also supplied a repackaged version of Stickies 6, formatted to the PortableApps.com specification. You can download that below:

Download kb00002b.zip (232k)