Installing Vista from a USB Flash Drive

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Microsoft Employee Kurt Shintaku has recently published a very useful guide on his blog explaining how to install Windows Vista directly from a USB thumb drive. Personally, I have not tried this out yet, but according to the author, installing Vista using this technique should take you about half the time of a standard install.

Why would someone want to install a client OS from a thumb drive instead of a DVDROM or over the network? One reason: Performance. Installing Windows Vista from a high speed USB flash drive is in my experience the easiest & fastest way to complete a Windows Vista install. This is much faster than using a DVD, gigabit ethernet, or possibly even some external USB 2.0 hard drives, due to differences in access speed & transfer rate.

2 Comments:

Roll on the time when people start using Flash Keys entirely, and your entire PC (data, programs, etc) is in your pocket. Plug into a 'terminal' (Monitor,Keyboard, Mouse) and continue where you left off.

I'm aware this has been done but not mainstream - until then we'll just 'edge forward' with "install off USB" ! Good to see, though, not knocking it!

By Mark, at 12:18 PM
Mark, you mean like portable apps? The only problem with those is you need a Mac-version and Win-version and a Lin-version on your flash drive to be able to load it on (almost--bsd's still left off) every drive

By Mackenzie, at 3:06 PM