Portable Workspace: Ready to run Windows 8 from a USB device?

Windows 8 - Portable Workspace

From weeks now early stages of Windows 8 have been leaked to the internet and many tech enthusiasts are already trying to uncover what is new about the next version of Microsoft Windows.

One feature that today has caught my attention comes from this post at winrumors. It seems that Windows 8 build 7850.0.winmain_win8m1.100922-1508 comes with very interesting features; one of them is Portable Workspace that according to the post, Microsoft may be targeting this feature to Enterprise costumers and will allow them to create a Portable Workspace in a USB external storage device that will load Windows from it. At the eyes of a regular Windows user this may not look like a big deal, but this could have a variety of scenarios where it can be very useful, and also this may just be well receive from IT professionals, as this could benefit to work more efficiently by booting a copy of Windows 8 much faster to troubleshoot existing Windows problems in a local machine and access to their own documents and workspace in a more secure way form a workstation. Also according to the post it has been discovered that this feature is going to require no less than 16GB of free space in the external storage device.

There still not much information about how ultimately Portable Workspace will work or what limitations is going to have, for what we can see now this feature is not new in the technology world, we have seen other operating systems do practically the same thing; one example is the many flavors of Linux live CDs that anyone can download and boot an operating system without making any changes to the current computer configuration, and as many of us have at one point or another used the same Linux live CD to diagnose existing problems in a Windows machine. There are workarounds to boot Windows today in a similar way, but now Microsoft is getting into the game properly.

Source & image via winrumors

About the author

Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 14 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me.