i’ve read somewhere that blender can be portably installed to a usb drive. if this is so, can someone point me to the tutorial?
just get the zip version of blender, unzip it on your USB Driver, and start Blender.exe … voilà 
One thing to remember, however, is that some of the scripts rely on python being installed. So it is possible that when you move from computer to computer with your USB device that the new target machine will not have python installed. Certain Blender import features may not be available. I would recommend that you grab the python install from python.org and keep it on your USB as well.