When you’re troubleshooting your computer or installing a new operating system, you may need to “boot from a disc” or USB device (like an external hard drive or flash drive). Here’s what ...

A bootable USB key is a convenient way to install operating systems on netbooks without optical drives, or carrying around a Live OS with you at all times. It especially makes sense if you're ...

Unplug unnecessary devices Another easy thing you can do to speed up your start-ups is make sure that you don't have any unnecessary USB devices plugged into your computer.

But with the advent of the tiny, lightweight, and portable USB key drive, system builders now have a new tool. I believe the USB key drive could alter—even usurp—our old rescue and ...

That’s where Ultimate Boot CD (henceforth UBCD) comes in. Cobbled together over the course of some 15 years, UBCD is a bootable collection of the best freeware tools for all kinds of rescue tasks.

Screenshot: Chromebook Recovery Utility Perhaps the hardest part of installing Chrome OS Flex is figuring out how to get your computer to boot from the USB drive that you’ve just created.

For more on why you might want to do this, see Boot discs explained: An overview of booting your PC from something other than your hard drive. For what to do when your PC won’t boot this way ...

That's it. Once the Windows 7 files have completed copying, insert your USB flash drive into a computer and boot it up to start the Windows 7 installation.

What do you use your USB flash drive for? How about maintaining a Windows computer? Parted Magic is a nifty partitioning tool that also includes a suite of other useful utilities.