Patent ID: 7376711

Claim:
A process for storing, managing, and retrieving a mobile computer user's personal computing environment, transportable via a memory device, in a computer environment, comprising: reading the user's personal computing environment data from said transportable memory device; in response to reading the user's personal computing environment data from said transportable memory device, accepting user input specifying indices indicating personal computing environment data on said transportable memory device needed to configure a client to at least a portion of the user's preferred personal computing environment; providing client self configuration means on a client for said client to configure its computing environment to the user's preferred personal computing environment according to at least said personal computing environment data from said transportable memory device; and wherein said personal computing environment data includes any of: operating system preferences, favorite Web sites, email addresses, credit card information, ISP information, program preferences, or program environments; allowing the user to transfer personal computing environment data between said transportable memory device and a user information database on a server; wherein said user information database contains user records of a plurality of users; and wherein user records for a particular user contain personal computing environment data of a size larger than a storage capacity of said transportable memory device; and wherein a user's user record is encrypted using a encryption key from the user's transportable memory device, and wherein each transportable memory device's encryption key is resident only on that particular transportable memory device.