If you’re looking for an ultra portable solution for your computing lifestyle, you might be interested in running Windows 10 from USB. It’s a good solution if you do light work on multiple computers. Now clearly, this is not the most ideal situation. For one, this will surely shortness the life cycle of your USB with the numerous reads and writes it’ll have to perform. Also, USB speed is much slower than SATA speed.
None the less, while gaming might take ages to perform (or rather, it will take a long time to load maps and other in game items), simple tasks such as word processing and Web browsing should be a breeze. Now to do this, you will need to have a USB flash drive (preferably USB 3.0) with at least 16GB of free space. I’m using a 30 GB USB 3.0 drive. So here’s how to run windows 10 from usb.
What You Will Need:
- Windows 10 iso
- 15 GB Flash Drive
- WinToUSB
Step 1: Install Windows using WinToUSB
To begin, you will need to have a Windows 10 ISO. If you don’t have one, you can use Microsoft’s media creation tool to download one. Afterwards, use the program WinToUSB to install Windows to your USB drive. You will choose the same partition for the boot and system partition, and choose VHD for the HD type. The process will take about 20 minutes.
Step 2: Booting
Once it’s done, insert your USB into the computer that you want to boot Windows on. Make sure you select it as the first boot device inside of your bios. On the first boot, it will detect your devices and spend time installing the device drivers. It will reboot again and take you through the setup process.
Using Windows 10 on a USB:
Like I said before, of you value your USB, don’t do this. The number of read and writes that it will be taking will surely shorten the life of it. As far as speed, its bareble but nothing comparable to using a normal data drive. If something starts to install in the background or download, well, everything comes to a stand still. Otherwise, for lite tasks its usuable