Your Computing Life, on a USB Thumb Drive

You can put an entire bootable operating system on a USB flash drive or customize your own collection of apps to run on any PC, anywhere. Here's how.

Why carry a bulky netbook or an oversize smartphone when you can have all the comforts of your own desktop—on any PC you encounter? That's the joy of carrying everything computable on a USB thumb drive. You can put an entire bootable operating system on these tiny flash-memory devices, or just carry around a few key files. The glorious in-between is using portable applications—software that runs off a USB drive, full installation on a PC not required.

If this concept sounds familiar to Macintosh users, it should. Since the dawn of System 1.0, Mac operating systems have had self-contained software. In Windows, installing a program, especially something as complicated as an office suite, typically involves stray files that reside in several areas of a hard drive. A DLL here, a swap file there, and of course, entries to the Windows Registry. It's what makes uninstalling many Windows programs particularly difficult. Hear me, Windows! Portable apps are what programs should always have been: self-contained and easy to get rid of. Even if one does write stray files to your hard drive, the rule is that the app should remove those files when you close it and disconnect the drive—provided you disconnect properly, of course.

Remember that you have to use Hi-Speed USB 2.0—not only on the drive, but also on the port. That 480-megabit-per-second (Mbps) speed is essential. This shouldn't be much of an issue, but it could crop up if you've got some ancient USB hub laying about with USB 1.1 ports. The tenfold speed increase coming with SuperSpeed USB 3.0 this year is only going to make portable apps all the more worthwhile.

Portable apps aren't limited just to USB thumb drives, either. Some can work on other types of flash memory, such as SD cards, or on other USB mass storage devices—even a media player like the iPod (though not the iPod touch or the iPhone). All that matters most of the time is that Windows sees the gadget as a USB Mass Storage device.