Take Your PC Anywhere With An OS On A USB

The advantage of devices like tablets and netbooks is that they are supremely portable. They also tend to be considerably cheaper than a full-fledged PC. One disadvantage they have though is that it’s likely they don’t have the same OS as your PC does. This can be a problem if you want to use the same full-functioning programs as your home computer. There are plenty of other reasons to want an OS you can boot from a USB as well, and it isn’t just limited to older versions of Windows.

Chromium on USB

This is something you can generally find on Ebay on large USB drives of 4 GB or more. The Google Chromium OS was designed for netbook type devices in order to be really light, low on memory, and easy to use. This is especially the case if the only thing you need it for is basically doing a lot of tasks on the Internet. AS a result, these are all characteristics that also make chromium good for making bootable on a USB drive. Obviously, the smaller the OS is the easier it will be to load on a USB drive and the less you have to spend on the flash drive.

Windows 8

As long as you can find a way to get a flash drive onto your portable device, you can usually find a way to boot an OS on the device. Here’s an example of one way to do this. Generally this method requires you to start off preparing the Windows 8 DVD on a regular PC and then preparing the USB drive using the original computer. You’ll have to input some DOS commands and mess around with the BIOS, so the method isn’t for the faint of heart or anyone who isn’t comfortable with that level of computer savvy.

Why Go Through the Trouble?
One of the main reasons to get a USB-bootable OS for a portable device is so that you can have your cake and eat it too, so to speak. You can combine the portability of a small device like a tablet or a netbook with the complete power of a fully realized OS. You will also create a portable system that is compatible with your main system. As an example, one of the problems with some netbooks, including the ones running Chromium, is that they can only run things from the Google Chrome browser. Virtually everything that happens on the device has to go through Google.

If you need to do more than that, or if you just want to impress customers with a particular presentation, you can use something like promotional flash drives to load with a bootable OS that is more powerful than Chromium so that your portable business presentations are not limited in power by whatever OS is on the portable device. Many portable devices can’t load more universal promotional material such as that used by PowerPoint, which is another problem with them. Fortunately it’s fixable with the right drives.

Author Bio:

Allen Marsh wrote this guest post. He is a freelance writer who shares his tech tips on various blogs.