Skype is a very popular instant messenger and P2P telephony software, widely used for its voice chat and PC-to-phone ability. However Skype does not run directly on a USB drive, making it essential to be installed everytime you want to use a different PC.

The Portable Freeware ^[1] team have come up with a tutorial that will help you hack the default Skype setup and use it from a USB drive.

Steps To Run Skype From A USB Drive

1. Download the latest version of Skype ^[2] and install it. (Skype 1.4 and above only)
2. Navigate to Program FilesSkypefolder, in this you will see three folders named Phone, Pictures and Wallpaper.
3. Navigate to the folder named Phone and copy Skype.exe and paste to a separate folder on your portable drive.
4. Create a folder named Datain the same folder you copied the earlier file to.
5. Copy the Pictures and Wallpaper folder from Program FilesSkypeto the Skype folder on the portable drive.
6. Create a new file with notepad and save it as skype.bat or runskype.bat, in the same folder where Skype.exe exists.
7. Open the file created in step 6 and paste "Skype.exe /datapath:data /removable" into it without the quotes.

The next time you want to launch Skype, just double-click the bat file you created and you can start using Skype, without having to install it on every PC you use.

[via Portable Freeware ^[3]]