Starting your Surface from a USB drive can be useful if you want to change firmware settings or Windows startup settings or if your Surface device does not turn on, start, boot, or wake from sleep.

We all need to start from scratch sometimes and if you're building a new PC, chances are you'll need to learn how to make a bootable USB drive. This will enable you to boot your PC directly from a USB ...

Businesses often require the use of dual-boot setups -- computers that can run more than one operating system -- to access certain applications or hardware. Some older software and devices aren't ...

A dual-boot setup enables us to run various operating systems without the need for additional hardware, on a single set of hardware, thus reducing total cost. We have already discussed how to dual ...

Windows XP takes up relatively little space on a hard drive and uses fewer system resources than recent versions of Windows. For computers with limited memory and processing power as well as no ...

When something goes wrong with your Mac, it's a boon to have a separate, external drive that you can work from — but Apple no longer makes that easy. Here's how to do it. The short answer to how you ...

A bootable Mac OS X thumb drive comes in handy when you need to troubleshoot OS issues for yourself, your family, or your friends. It’s also extremely useful for keeping your basic setup consistent ...

PSA: for MOST use cases there is now a much easier solution. If your primary goal is just to download updates faster/not use up your limited data budget, and you have multiple Macs (otherwise why do ...

Load up a USB drive with the right software, and you’ll have a complete toolkit to restart, troubleshoot, and repair Windows PCs. I’ve learned to keep a collection of useful Windows tools and repair ...

Margaret T. wants to boot from a flash drive and work on documents from there. You’ll need to get an operating system onto the flash drive. You’ve got a number of ...