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Thread: OS / "computer" on USB stick ?

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    OS / "computer" on USB stick ?

    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 ?

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    I've used Puppy Linux for such things. Boots off just about anything including USB sticks. BTW - it's free.
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    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
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift View Post
    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

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    Quote Originally Posted by superquag View Post
    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.
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    Quote Originally Posted by superquag View Post
    ....

    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.
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    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.
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    Quote Originally Posted by superquag View Post
    ...bare bones LINUX.
    Quote Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift View Post
    The usb will be even slower than the HDD How to Run Windows 10 From a USB Drive Software
    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.

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    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.
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    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.

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