Puppy on a stick

Wouldn't it be nice if you could carry around not only your files and portable applications, but an entire operating system on a USB stick? Just stick it into any Intel based machine which allows booting from a USB device (most post Windows 95 machines do), and away you go. When you're finished, everything is updated on your stick and nothing is done to, or left behind, on the host's drive. Yet, you can still access the host's drive, if you want to. Which makes it a great tool for rescuing files from a hard disk which won't boot.

There are several Linux versions which can do this, but Puppy Linux is perhaps the best. It gives you an amazing array of capabilities and programs, using only about 100 MB of space on your stick, and loads entirely in RAM on a machine with as little as 256 MB of RAM. Being small and running completely from RAM makes this operating system fly, even on old machines. And since it boots faster and shuts down much faster than Windows, less of your time is wasted waiting for that over-bloated dinosaur to come up and go away each time. Write documents, burn disks, listen to music, watch videos, surf the web, get your mail, and be done fast.