Your entire PC on a USB drive

MALAISE

THanks Coen

I'll try it very soon, it seems to be quite useful to get your own applications on locations
where PC are forbidden for safety reasons ( Research labs ....). For instance, I could use it for
testing machines using my own diag sofware..

sepo

Anyone tried SU with this ?

marne

I tried it, including SU. Very nice intention behind this program. Easy to setup and works like a charm.
But as I tried to use it on a PC where I can't logon with administrative permissions it didn't work.
I'm teaching SU on a college and wanted to show the students how my personal SU with all the plugins looks and works like (esp. the paid scripts) and it failed. Too bad.
Beside I was missing an easy-to-use-encryption. By placing all my valuable scripts on a usb pen i may loose, anyone who finds it could browse through the (program files) folders (i think i was reading about improvements on this in the newest version...).

For everyone having access to several pcs with admin permissions i would recommend it. Its a nice, "cheap" and better working alternative to thinstall

-just my opinion

remus

Marne, you could always encrypt the USB pen. I believe there are a few programs that will allow you to decrypt the drive while your on the move, although i dont know if you need admin permissions.

marne

Yes of course, it's easy to encrypt an usb pen. The problem was, that I wanted to put some personal data (f.e. paid scripts) on my portable desktop (modjo drive) without de- and encrypting 3gb (2gig for my su only, with all textures and components) of data on a usb device what takes way to long. It might have been useful for me, if there is something like login and boot for modjo and all its data is in untouchable container, only modjo has access to after login' in. Thats what I meant. Sorry for my inarticulately english

Pixero

...or you could use ThinApp (theres a demo version) to make a portable version of SketchUp. Works like a charm.

I also used Virtualbox to setup a virtual "new" PC with a fresh intstall of XP. Then install ThinApp into it and run it and install SketchUp and add plugins, shortcuts and what ever settings you use and then finish up with ThinApp.

marne

@pixero said:

...or you could use ThinApp (theres a demo version) to make a portable version of SketchUp. Works like a charm.

I also used Virtualbox to setup a virtual "new" PC with a fresh intstall of XP. Then install ThinApp into it and run it and install SketchUp and add plugins, shortcuts and what ever settings you use and then finish up with ThinApp.

Yip you're right Pixero, this works great. Or you just take the portable version of virtualbox with you, to have your own xp on the road... but this needs admin permissions and a big pen too
btw wasn't there a need to delete the thinstalled aplications after the trialperiod was over...?

geh4evr

I've just installed it on a Pendrive(Quite literally, It's a USB stick embedded in a Pen ), and It works pretty well, I'm going to download SketchUp now.

EDIT

I've downloaded SketchUp Free, and it seems to work pretty well. I didn't do anything to over the top, but it was able to handle a test model of about 1 MB. I'm going to slowly start moving some of my programs on over to MojoPac now.

I really must say, It's one of the best programs I've ever seen. I travel a lot between 4 computers all over the world, so it's great that I can just bring the programs with me

Final Edit

This is cool, I'm now typing this whilst running Firefox on MojoPac, Running within Firefox is my OnlineOS called g.ho.st. So I have an OS within a browser Within an OS, all on a Pen.

Pixero

@unknownuser said:

btw wasn't there a need to delete the thinstalled aplications after the trialperiod was over...?

Yes, but if you install on a virtualbox XP you "could" rewind it to its pre installed state and reinstall the thinstall demo again...
As for the SketchUp (or what ever software you want portable) you register it as usual. So they are not in demo mode.

Ross Macintosh

Or if the demo shows you it is useful to you -- you could buy the program.

brodie

installed and very impressed by mojopac! One thing I noticed was that my test model looked really choppy so I went to turn on AA and the option to turn on Hardware Acceleration was not only turned off but was grayed out so I couldn't turn it on. Others have this same issue?

I wonder if it's just a SU thing though or maybe and OpenGL thing since no one was complaining about this in relation to gaming.

Hrm...on second thought maybe it's because my mojopac "computer" doesn't have the graphics card drivers...I'll download the driver and retest when I get time.

-Brodie

tomot

I spent a lot of time installing an nLite'd version of XP on my eeepc.
I installed it on a removable 2gb USB thumb drive, and also on a 4gb
SDHC Ultra SanDisk card. If you want to know how to do this goto

http://forum.eeeuser.com/ also do some searching in the wiki there.

If you want to know more how to make your own stripped down version of XP goto
http://www.nliteos.com/

My current stripped down version of XP is only 190 megs.

I can boot my eeepc from either the Zandros default OS or XP from the
SDHC Ultra SanDisk card which is installed in an MMC.SD slot in my eeepc.

tomot

I should not leave readers with the impression that this method only works for the eeepc. made my ASUS
I can take my SDHC card and plug it into an adapter (which you can buy together with an SDHC card at Costco)
http://shop.sandisk.com/store/sdiskus/en_US/DisplayCategoryProductListPage/parentCategoryID.11443000/categoryID.11448600

Now plug that adapter into a regular PC and from the boot menu on my PC I can point it to, and boot XP from my USB port
which contains the SDHC card. Or I can take the same setup to any other PC whose bios is capable to boot from USB.

So the next question should be how many programs can I store on the 4 gb and still have room for data:

Good Question! here is my list!

The XP OS, stripped down version naturally
The entire Open Office suite
Acronis TrueImage
Adobe Reader
ACDsee
CCleaner
Gimp
Google Sketchup
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
RocketDock
Skype
Snagit
VLC media player
Winrar
WinAmp

and I still have 1.3 gb left for data

brodie

Coen,

you mentioned speed. Just wanted to throw out there that I didn't run a test on a little flash drive card but the speed is wonderful on my external hard drive. I ran AquaMark which is sort of a directx benchmarker and it ran exactly the same numbers on mojo as it did on my pc w/o using mojo. Actually it was even slightly faster on Mojo but the difference was so slight it's probably a statistical 0.

Here are the stats from my regular computer settings

Score: 78,521
GFX: 13,599
CPU: 9,287
AVG. FPS: 78.52

And from MojoPac running off my external hard drive

Score: 78,559
GFX: 13,587
CPU: 9,311
AVG. FPS: 78.56

-Brodie

tomot

@unknownuser said:

Congratulations Tomot, you've successfully taken the thread off-topic.
Next time please start a new topic.

I must be mistaken, I thought the title of the thread was " Your entire PC on a USB drive"
so what part of my response is off topic?

geh4evr

The Speed isn't bad, I was able to run Firefox slightly slower than the Host PC could. SketchUp was about 1/4 the speed of the host though.

HFM

@tomot said:

@unknownuser said:

Congratulations Tomot, you've successfully taken the thread off-topic.
Next time please start a new topic.

I must be mistaken, I thought the title of the thread was " Your entire PC on a USB drive"
so what part of my response is off topic?

Yes Coen didn't get that comment either

Anyway, testing MojoPac right now [on a very slow pc]
tomorrow I'm going to stresstest it on another pc with sketchup

Thanks for this hint Coen, I was searching for something to run sketchup including plugins for about half a year now

Jackson

@unknownuser said:

Congratulations Tomot, you've successfully taken the thread off-topic.
Next time please start a new topic.

Huh? Tomot explained (very clearly) the process of how he has managed to boot his entire PC from a 4Gb flash memory- how on earth is that off-topic?

cdubea

@marne said:

I tried it, including SU. Very nice intention behind this program. Easy to setup and works like a charm.
But as I tried to use it on a PC where I can't logon with administrative permissions it didn't work.
I'm teaching SU on a college and wanted to show the students how my personal SU with all the plugins looks and works like (esp. the paid scripts) and it failed. Too bad.
Beside I was missing an easy-to-use-encryption. By placing all my valuable scripts on a usb pen i may loose, anyone who finds it could browse through the (program files) folders (i think i was reading about improvements on this in the newest version...).

For everyone having access to several pcs with admin permissions i would recommend it. Its a nice, "cheap" and better working alternative to thinstall

-just my opinion

SketchUp can actually be run from a USB drive IF the host computer has dotnet framework installed.

See my discussion at

http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=11863#p84473

I use it pretty much every day at work on a machine I do not have admin privileges on.

chris

cdubea

@unknownuser said:

Windows XP only, but this little application (there is a free version) seems to be able to run applications portably even if they're not made as a portable application.

http://www.mojopac.com/index.html

This might be true, but there is a MAJOR gotcha. You have to have administrative privileges on the host machine.

https://system.netsuite.com/app/center/center.nl/ctype.KB/it.I/id.2099/KB.2/.f

Kinda defeats the purpose.

Something called MojoPac Usher can be installed on the host machine, but you have to have administrative privileges on the host machine to do so.

Too bad, this could have been very useful!

chris