Scenario:
One of my colleagues has a Windows 10 based laptop that uses multiple tabs of Chrome at any given point of time. Primarily for the use of Google Sheets and Google Docs. Besides this she also uses:
• Hangouts for conferencing wherein she needs to share her screen
• Discord for Team Collaboration
• Skype for messaging
• Open Broadcaster Software(OBS) for audio-video recording
Performance finetuning of Win 10 has helped to improve the overall performance of her windows based laptop. But not as good as she would have preferred it to be. Hardware upgradation for performance improvement was not a factor for consideration .
Suggested Solution:
A dual boot of the existing Windows based system with Linux variants like Ubuntu may be helpful. I have noticed that machines that don’t run well on Win 10 run well on Ubuntu and Linux Mint. That's why many older machines are best run on Linux variants. Now it has also been my experience that when I dual boot Ubuntu (on HDD drive) with Windows(on SSD drive), the performance of Windows on SSD seems comparable, if not better than the performance of Linux on HDD. To give a very rough approximation !!!
And my colleagues laptop has a HDD, not SSD. So why not create a Bootable USB 3.0 Disk with persistent storage and try to give a boost in performance over her existing Windows based system ?
What is Ubuntu USB drive with persistent storage?
- When I plug in a normal USB drive, I am able to save files in it.
- When I plug in a USB bootable drive with Ubuntu (Live USB), I can also boot into Ubuntu and use the operating system without actually being able to save files to the USB. (well theoretically I can save files. But after I reboot , the files won't be there)
- When I plug into a USB bootable drive with Ubuntu with persistent storage, I can use the USB both as an operating system and also save files, install programs etc., to this USB drive. It pretty much acts like a hard disk on which the operating system is loaded.
Bootable USB with Persistent storage per se in not a new concept. I have used it with Puppy Linux earlier. Now Puppy Linux was created for tech savvy people and that’s one of the reasons it is not as sleek as Ubuntu. And it cannot be used as general purpose OS. It is also not as widely deployed as Ubuntu. So how about creating a bootable Ubuntu USB drive with persistent storage?
Things you need
- A pen drive. I am using a 32 GB pen drive for this experiment. An 8 GB pen drive is also good enough. The larger the better, becos then we can have more storage. Most importantly try to have a USB 3.0 pen drive (when this is connected to USB 3.0 port on the computer, it offers better read write speeds, effectively making the performance better)
- Download the ISO file of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa). Choose the Desktop image. I prefer the Long Term Support(LTS) as the support for this is generally available for 5 years.
- Rufus. The present and latest version at the moment is 3.12.1710. Download Rufus from here
Creating a Bootable USB with persistent storage:
This is the easiest part. Just choose the options as shown in the screen shot below. Pay attention to the slider under the header "Persistent Partition Size" and choose the appropriate size as per your USB storage size. For my 32 GB, I am using 8 GB as persistent storage.
As for the partition scheme, choose GPT if your machine is UEFI, otherwise choose MBR. Click START at the bottom of Rufus and wait until it is done. You need to remember that all data , if any, on the USB will be deleted before the creation of the bootable USB.
In case you have run into issues with Rufus, some of the alternatives include:
- Ventoy : This is a launched recently only in April 2020 (the corona baby !!!) and has a unique installation method. Here we need to Install Ventoy To USB Drive. Then place an ISO in the USB drive and it becomes bootable. So we can also store files just as we would normally do so in a normal USB.
- UNetBootin : This is a very old product which has been around for a very long time. The UI looks very old, but the product is a good one and it also supports persistent storage. It is supported in Linux, Windows and Mac also.
Boot from USB:
Connect this pendrive to out computer . Restart the computer and get into the BIOS settings. Since the BIOS settings vary from computer to computer, you will have to find out how to get into the BIOS. In my case, I just need to press the esc button multiple times soon after I start the computer. In case you want to change the settings such that you can always boot from USB, do so in the BIOS.
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