Vista Month: Install Vista From A USB Drive

Well it's the final day in our Vista Month and I just stumbled across a handy trick to speed up your Vista instalations should you choose to make the leap.

Blogger Kurt Shintaku has posted some instructions on how to install Windows Vista from a USB flash drive. Now why would you want to do that? Well this tip is mainly for those that have several machines to upgrade; Shintaku explains:

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. To put this into perspective, y'know how installing Windows on a Virtual PC virtual machine from an .ISO CD image is really, really, really fast? Imagine something roughly just as fast, except for doing installations of the OS on to actual workstations.

Naturally you'll need a Windows Vista DVD and a flash drive. Shintaku recommends an Apacer 4 gig drive, but anything of similar size will likely work. The process is fairly simple, just format the drive and copy Vista DVD. There's a few command line formatting steps to set up the drive though, so be sure to read through his instructions before you embark.