OS / "computer" on USB stick ?

[superquag]

Nice easy one for the cognescenti.
I've been seeing adverts for a super-fast "computer" (?) on a USB stick, and I'm guessing an operating system such as a bare bones LINUX. Prices are around $14 to $20 -ish.

I've got a spare, older laptop, running an i5 CPU, so not toooo shabby, but the HDD / WIN 7 is as slow as a politician's promise. Out of curiosity, and just for internet surfing/blogs - and annoying folk here. Are they a useful OS or a useful sampler of the LINUX universe ?

[Ferret]

I've used Puppy Linux (https://distrowatch.com/table.php'distribution=puppy) for such things. Boots off just about anything including USB sticks. BTW - it's free.

[Pedro_The_Swift]

apart from the small price difference why not just swap out the HDD for an SSD,, $40?
The usb will be even slower than the HDD


How to Run Windows 10 From a USB Drive Software (https://au.pcmag.com/windows-10-1/46896/how-to-run-windows-10-from-a-usb-drive)

[Eevo]

apart from the small price difference why not just swap out the HDD for an SSD,, $40?
The usb will be even slower than the HDD



what this man said

[JDNSW]

Nice easy one for the cognescenti.
I've been seeing adverts for a super-fast "computer" (?) on a USB stick, and I'm guessing an operating system such as a bare bones LINUX. Prices are around $14 to $20 -ish.

I've got a spare, older laptop, running an i5 CPU, so not toooo shabby, but the HDD / WIN 7 is as slow as a politician's promise. Out of curiosity, and just for internet surfing/blogs - and annoying folk here. Are they a useful OS or a useful sampler of the LINUX universe ?

I don't know what you are seeing - I doubt that at that price is in fact a real computer on a USB stick, although i believe such things do exist.

I would be wary of anything sold as such, as you don't know what else you are getting- for example a bitcoin mining system (for the vendor's benefit).

If you want to sample the Linux universe, probably go to distrowatch.com and have a look at their lists of popular Linux 'distributions' in the column on the right side. These are links to all of them, sorted by popularity, and they can be downloaded from their own webpage, where you will also find instructions for making a bootable USB. ("Popularity" is hard to define - I think they use google queries or something simiar) You possibly want to look near the top of this list.

Most Linux distributions will easily outperform WIN 7 (not just the barebones ones), while being up to date with known vulnerabilities dealt with. They vary from beginner to expert in ease of use, and as suggested Puppy Linux is one of the most barebones ones. I use Linux Mint XFCE, but have used a number of others.

[AK83]

....

I've got a spare, older laptop, running an i5 CPU, so not toooo shabby, but the HDD / WIN 7 is as slow as a politician's promise. Out of curiosity, and just for internet surfing/blogs - and annoying folk here. Are they a useful OS or a useful sampler of the LINUX universe ?

If you have this spare laptop, and it's slow, then it's because the OS hasn't been 'cleaned up' in a long time.
It gathers all sorts of flotsam, and slows down over time.
Just do a wipe and fresh install of whatever OS it has(eg. Win7), and that alone will speed it up again.
And if you want to keep it 'fast' then don't install the vendors OS via any CDs/backup disks or whatever, they install so much add on crapware that make it slow too.
Just get whatever OS you have on it from the source, and try to stop any unecessary services you don't really need.

eg. if you have a Dell, or Toshiba or whatever brand laptop and it has Win7, just locate a copy of Win7 from M$ directly, and install that, not the Dell or Toshiba version of their backup disk.
You should have a serial number on the laptop somewhere, so as long as the OS matches what it currently has, ie. don't try to install Win7 Pro if it has Win7 Home! .. you'll be fine.

And as others said, don't go buying a cpmputer on a USB stick .. they'll use the crappiest USB stick possible(ie. a $1 piece of junk!). If you have any USB sticks lying around you can use them and install Linux or even a portable Windows OS if you prefer that.

[Blknight.aus]

theres a stack of these that you can download and set up on almost any USB stick.

I have a moderately barebones linux stick with portable open office installed and have the usb stick partitioned with an option setup on the boot partition so that if a moderately recent version of windows is used to read the stick (as opposed to booting from it) it only sees the second partition which is where all the non OS user files are kept.

Word of warning, its slow when its running as a boot device. and if you're aiming for true portability you loose a lot of features from the hardware you run on because of lack of drivers (mine only does 800x600 vga with usb mouse/keyboard and drive support no sound or network but its only intended to access whats on the drive and give me the most rudimentary of DTP and PDF access)

I've heard tell that there is a way to get some external SSD usb C devices to be bootable, that should be 50-60% faster than the USB solution.

[workingonit]

...bare bones LINUX.


The usb will be even slower than the HDD How to Run Windows 10 From a USB Drive Software (https://au.pcmag.com/windows-10-1/46896/how-to-run-windows-10-from-a-usb-drive)

I use bare bones Puppy Linux on USB. Once load to the computer, the USB just sits there doing not much. I load the O/S to RAM in about the same time windows takes to boot, if not quicker. In RAM is about as fast as you can get. Yes, slow if you fire up the word processor/spreadsheet for the first time (but still only a few seconds), but once loaded gives rapid response. I use it for general stuff like internet, office apps, vid playback, online banking etc. Nothing gets saved unless you want. Every time it is opened it is a fresh as the day it was built, no previous session stuff hanging on, no viruses etc. It is a bit of a faff around putting it on USB. There is a quote somewhere about using Puppy, made by the head of AFP tech security(?) - 2 things he does when banking (1) not going to his bank by a site referral, and (2) not using Windows - he uses Puppy in RAM. Most things you need already come in the package, but you have access to a limited library of extra installations.

If I want to use CAD for example I'll go to windows or higher powered Linux, but off line.

Life can be difficult in the Linux world, however.

I bought a new laptop, explaining I wanted to use Linux. As would have it the sales guy uses Ubuntu, showed me his high end gaming laptop machine about 18 months old, tucked under the counter, using it for trouble shooting and other shop related things. This was one of the major chains. He had a background in writing software.

Took the new machine home, did bios changes, firing up any Linux flavour without problem, except all failed to get wireless access. Hmmm.

Back to the shop. The sales guy had a go...no luck. We then went to low and high end machines, of different brands in their sales range, and non would give wireless access to Puppy or Ubuntu or a few other flavours we downloaded...the sales guy could not believe it.

Left the machine with him for a week. He and another (hardware) expert tried to resolve the problem. Their research seemed to indicate manufacturers on new machines are limiting wireless access to Windows, on the pretext that it improves security. They found Ubuntu had a work around, which I guess will take time to filter through to other Linux flavours. Would be interesting to get other Linux users take on this if they have recently updated their laptop.

[JDNSW]

I doubt that the manufacturers deliberately limit access to wireless devces because they are not Windows. It is simply because when the manufacturers build a new wireless device to be fitted to computers, they write a Windows driver for it, because that is what most manufacturers of laptops want. And keep the details of how to interface their device to themselves so their competitors can't copy the device. They may or may not get round to writing a Linux driver some time later. The Linux kernel maintainers may occasionally get hold of enough information to write a driver for incorporation in the kernel, or even ask for and get the information. Or a third party may write a driver, perhaps by reverse engineering the Windows driver.

Any of these routes is likely to mean the Linux driver is only going to appear perhaps a year after the hardware does. And then only becomes available for the distribution of your choice when the kernel it uses is updated to the kernel that has the driver (there may be a workaround for this).

I might comment I have been using Linux exclusively for around ten years, and have never seen this issue. On the other hand, I tend not to buy bleeding edge hardware.

[vnx205]

I have also been using Linux exclusively at home for over fifteen years and have never had issues with drivers.

However, that is probably because my idea of updating my computer is to replace my ten year old desktop with a free five year old desktop that someone else has decided wasn't good enough to handle the latest version of Windows.

Hardly bleeding edge stuff, but it does what I need to do.

I sometimes play around with different distros running from a USB but haven't come across anything to tempt me away from LXLE. Some of the steps are initially a bit slower when running from the USB.

[austastar]

Hi,
For my last year at work I did a trial of using Ubuntu instead of the standard Win XP install on my supplied Dell computer.
Running a help desk and several remote servers was almost seamless from the remote desktop.
Even Word documents were no trouble, and often a formatting problem could be solved by opening it in the Ubuntu WP, sorting out the errors, and saving it back to word.
For Mac or Windows specific programs such as Celcat or Filemaker, remoting into a desktop from Ubuntu was easy enough.
The uni could have saved a lot of $ by going open source, but the bean counters were not prepared to move from a commercial platform.
Chers

[AK83]

.....
The uni could have saved a lot of $ by going open source, but the bean counters were not prepared to move from a commercial platform.
Chers

They're either getting kickbacks of some form or another, or planning to climb the corporate ladder at said commercial software vendor! [wink11]

[austastar]

Possibly, but maybe scared of having nobody to pursue in court if anything sotware goes pear-shaped.
Cheers

[JDNSW]

Possibly, but maybe scared of having nobody to pursue in court if anything sotware goes pear-shaped.
Cheers

I admire your opinion of application software!

[Tote]

They're either getting kickbacks of some form or another, or planning to climb the corporate ladder at said commercial software vendor! [wink11]

Or they don't want to explain to their boss that there is no level 3 support to call when things go bad because they cheaped out on the support contract. Plenty of linux distros offer a supported version but then its no longer free...

Regards,
Tote

[p38arover]

I've tried a few distros of Linux and have currently settled on Mint. As a Windows user, I find it better suited to me than Ubuntu or Xubuntu.

Having said that, I still don't like Linux. It's a pain in the proverbial compared with Windows when installing apps. I spent days trying to get Dropbox installed with Ubuntu (and failed) but only half a day with Mint (with success).

[Eevo]

Having said that, I still don't like Linux. It's a pain in the proverbial compared with Windows when installing apps. I s



welcome to linux. thats what its like

[incisor]

welcome to linux. thats what its like

not my experience i have to say...

10 years ago i would have agreed with you but not these days

on many machines it is easier to get a stable linux install than it is a windows install esp if you are using industry standard hardware...

very late model mac hardware being the exception

[Eevo]

not my experience i have to say...

10 years ago i would have agreed with you but not these days

on many machines it is easier to get a stable linux install than it is a windows install esp if you are using industry standard hardware...

very late model mac hardware being the exception


linux has come a long way in 10 years yes but i dont believe its better than windows for the average user. i still feel linux is less out of the box ready.
fresh windows install will see my tinkering for aboout 5hours
fresh linu install will see me tinkering forever.

[incisor]

linux has come a long way in 10 years yes but i dont believe its better than windows for the average user. i still feel linux is less out of the box ready.
fresh windows install will see my tinkering for aboout 5hours
fresh linu install will see me tinkering forever.

again that's certainly not my experience...

these days your tinkering with windows for ever to keep networking and other basics going after updates

with a linux install that is not an issue, even more so with an LTS release

a few minutes reading up on your particular distros pack manager and tick a few boxes and your done

esp for your average joe blow internet user thats needs a browser, and email client, an office package and so solitaire :p

i do ubuntu studio, kubuntu, and non free debian kde boxes for people that i used to sell apple boxes to, for those hat cannot cope with windows and thats lots of oldies on limited budgets

you get one or two support calls and then nothing for months... not good for cash flow but great for them...

boxes for gamers is a whole different kettle of fish...

[vnx205]

After using Linux for something like 15 years, I can't remember the last time an installation didn't go smoothly. Everything has always just worked without any tinkering. I have played around with a few distros and installed quite a few apps over the years. Often it was just curiosity that motivated me rather than actually needing the app. Once again, I can't remember the last time I struck a problem.

I have also installed Linux on a few machines for friends, all of whom are over 70 and none of them have had any issues.

Maybe the fact that most of the installs have been on machines that were a few years old is part of the reason there have been no problems. Although a couple of them were reasonably new laptops.

I don't doubt for one minute that others have had problems and I don't suggest for one minute that it is their fault. I just want to make the point that not everyone has problems and not everyone needs to resort to the CLI to sort things out. Some users manage to do all they need to do without ever being aware of the OS on their machine.

[Eevo]

these days your tinkering with windows for ever to keep networking and other basics going after updates



windows updates is easily the worst part of windows at the moment.
or is thw worst part the telemetry?

[p38arover]

these days your tinkering with windows for ever to keep networking and other basics going after updates

That's not my experience.

[incisor]

That's not my experience.

Please defer to your propensity thread........

[p38arover]

Something has to go right for me - occasionally.

[workingonit]

It's a pain in the proverbial compared with Windows when installing apps.


welcome to linux. thats what its like

Linux flavours often have app stores. There was talk in the Linux community of having a standard app download and install procedure across all flavours to make it as easy as Windows.

[JDNSW]

Almost all Linux distributions, if not all, have "repositories". These have software applications that are tested to work with the Linux distribution, and almost never include any malicious code. It is very rarely that most users will have any occasion to install any software not in the repository. Even where the software can be supplied direct from whoever maintains it, there is rarely any reason to get it from there rather than the repository.

Some distributions are adopting one (or both) of two methods of packaging software that allow identical packages to be installed without ensuring that they will run on the distribution. Again, these are usually available from the distribution's repository, but also can be installed direct from the supplier. The only advantage seems to be that you may get a newer version of the software.

Software in the repository is almost always free of charge, and can be installed simply and quickly. Furthermore, for most distributions, the software in the repository is continually updated, and you are notified when updates are available, but you don't have to do the updates until convenient, although some allow you to automate this. For example, on my system, Firefox was updated from 75 to 76 on 9/5, and the Linux kernel itself on 30/4. Even most kernel updates do not require the system to be rebooted.

[loanrangie]

I used run a dual boot Ubuntu on my old xp laptop, also tried various distros with some success. No way I could handle the crap I would get from the rest of house hold if I ran Linux on our main PC.

[JDNSW]

My 14yo grand daughter has appropriated my old laptop with Mint, and the 10yo uses my old desktop (Mint) when she is here. Neither seems to be worried that they are not Windows, but I suppose you could call them "digital natives".

[superquag]

My old, hand-me-down laptop is now.... "Minted" Easy and no stress for this Card-Carrying [B]Luddite.[bigsad]

Time will tell, though quietly confident we'll live happily ever after. - if i fix the intermittant CHARGE socket...and alas, the battery is past it's Best Before date. $65 on evilBay. (ASUS K52F series, i5 processor)

Thanks to all who replied and Encouraged. !

EDIT: During the installation, (dual O/S) it told me the HDD is 500 GB ! So I took the plunge and left it there, other option was buy & install a SSD... still might happen if this one dies.

[Pedro_The_Swift]

SSD's,, still the biggest boost in computer speed ever.
all the new nvme's and fast ram in the world wont make the impact a simple hdd to ssd swap will.

and its a dead simple drop in thing. [wink11]

[AK83]

My kids learned to 'surf' on an old PC I didn't throw out having installed Linux.
I think that's about the time I switched to Firefox as well. I was on Opera at the time
As it was their first foray into playing on computers, so they had no computer memory muscle issues to overcome. My wife(now ex) tho didn't like it, as she grew up on Windows.
"Where are the files, what are these sda and sdb where's my C drive, where's My Pictures ... "

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu wasn't around in those days, so it may have been Mandrake or KDE can't recall.
I didn't use it much, just a curio.
I was going to build a NAS box out of another old piece of hardware I had about, but then did all the numbers(including power usage) and it just made more sense to buy a small NAS box which also served well under the TV as our media centre.

I have tried Ubuntu a long time ago .. maybe one day will do it again.
But I can't recall ever having issues installing anything with any of them.

Yesterday tho, it did take me a good 5 or so hours trying to get LineageOS installed on an old SGS5 with the Google apps compatibility.
So yeah, if they can make one for all 'app store' type repository for software, I'd reckon more folks would give it a go.



SSD's,, still the biggest boost in computer speed ever.
all the new nvme's and fast ram in the world wont make the impact a simple hdd to ssd swap will.

and its a dead simple drop in thing. [wink11]

Yes and no. Not always, but usually. And if it's a drop in update, then more than likely the fresh install of Windows will have made as much difference in speed.
Some computers can be made or come with decently fast HDDs, it just depends on which/what it is.

nvme will make the bigger difference over an SSD compared to a HDD tho. minimum 2-3x faster, and it depends on what exactly you're doing on the computer.

My PC is primarily for editing large RAW files off cameras, and with the raw images loaded on the nvme, the difference in editing speed is more marked than if I store them on the plain jane 2.5" SSD.
SSD tops out at 500Mb/s, whereas the nvme tops out at just shy of 1500MB/s. It's all older gen hardware now tho, maybe 6 or more years.
Son's more recent PC with it's billion MB/s nvme drive rockets by comparison to mine if I do the same photo edits on it.
I think we recorded a 4 second Windows boot time(no log on) on his just after we finished it.

[Eevo]

going from hdd to ssd is the best bang for buck upgrade you can make on an older pc hands down.

its not about the throughput speed, its about the lag, which equates to responsiveness to the end user.

[AK83]

going from hdd to ssd is the best bang for buck upgrade you can make on an older pc hands down.

....

I respectfully disagree through lots of experience.
Not sayign it's not a good bang for buck, but the problem is the buck .. you need to spend it.
Best bang for buck is a reinstall of the OS fresh. Backup your stuff, fresh install and remove services that you don't need.
I see so many old PC running silly services from Apple and Adobe that make their old PCs sluggish, and a refresh of the OS and removal of automatically starting services and software helps just as much .. but there's no 'buck' component.
Hence better bang for buck.

Of course adding a new storage device like an SSD at the same time will improve the bang component.
And like I explained in my previous post, it really depends on what you're using the old PC for too.
If you're doing very arduous media encoding, just the SSD doesn't help all that much, as encoding requires heavy CPU utilisation more than storage speed. Depending on the software used, it may also benefit from an updated graphics device .. etc.

As an example of the above:
I have Nikon cameras, so edit 90Mb Nikon raw files. These translate into 200Mb+ tiff files. Those tiff files are stored in a cache area.
With the old HDDs Nikon's Capture NX2 software was quite slow at some things(as it's dealing with 200Mb tif files. Many people that used CNX2 complained about it's slow speed for editing.
I bought a couple of Samsung HDDs, they were very well rated at the time(this is more than 10 years ago).
Used the Samsung HDD as the cache area only so that the files were on a slower drive, but the software placed the temporary tif files on the new much faster Samsung drive now.
The old cache HDD was half the speed(about 50-60MB/s vs 100ish+ for the Samsung now.
Editing steps became instant, except for one edit step which was noise reduction. All other edits relied on storage speed, NR was pure CPU dependent.
So with the slower drives, you'd make an edit like brighten or darken or whatever it'd take a sec or two to process and display the new edit step. With the Samsung HDD it was noticable in that the image would update, but tenths of a second type noticable.
But even with the faster storage now, if I used NR, there was no change(maybe a sec or so quicker) with the application of NR. Sometimes 30sec, sometimes 1 min.

This is why I say it depends on what you're doing with the PC. if you want the old PC to do CPU intensive applications, updating the SSD won't help, the CPU is still the same old one.
If you want it to boot up quicker, best bet is to fresh install, and minimise start up services and software.
If you want faster browse speed, either change your browser or, if you have them, stop some of the addons.

My slowest device at the moment is an old Gigabyte S1080 (Windows)tablet. Nice idea, would like one again but minimal need for it. It's battery is dead.
It's glacier during an iceage type sluggish.
It had a woeful HDD, which I updated to a better HDD. improvement(from 4500RPM to 7200RPM) for sure. Then I got an SSD, and that improved it's start up yet again. But those improvements were incremental. Say from 1min to 45 sec to 30 sec or whatever.
Never a lighting speed boost. It uses an Atom CPU, so it's just a slug. It was handy to adjust the LPG system in an old car I had back then, and some other stuff like run Ozi desktop in the car, and do some image sorting when out on the road and it had sim, so I also got a data sim for it.
So it was connectable too, and could be used as a phone if needed. Handy little thing back then.
This is more than 10 years ago.
The best upgrade I did for it tho was to update to Win10 when it came out and was a free upgrade from Win7. Cut boot times like crazy compared to even the SSD upgrade.

For an old laptop, for sure an SSD upgrade is really the only option you can choose. Can't change any other hardware (easily).