Who does not want to carry his laptop around, can easily manage to keep favorite programs and personal files on a USB stick, but not only, he can make the USB stick itself, almost, a computer. Before it is said that this article is misleading, it must be specified that a standard USB stick cannot be transformed into a complete PC because in addition to the monitor it lacks the most important part of a computer, that is the processor.
However, you can make sure that this USB stick is configured in such a way that, using it as the boot disk of any computer, it can work by loading its own operating system, independent of the one installed in the used PC, capable of run programs and save personal files without leaving any trace on that system.
The magic trick that turns a USB stick into a PC is to copy a portable operating system onto it.
These are Linux systems designed for portability, which start automatically by inserting the USB stick into a computer socket before turning it on.
The only thing you need to do on that computer is to change the boot order by putting the USB drive before the internal hard disk and you're done.
As portable operating systems, already listed in another article, we can still mention Xubuntu or Puppy Linux, which work alone and also come in very small 4 GB sticks and above all Tails, the system that leaves no traces on the computer in use.
The installation of these portable operating systems only requires copying them to the USB stick with a program to burn ISO to USB such as Rufus, which makes the drive bootable on boot.
Those who are allergic to Linux, if you don't want to learn a new operating system, you can also put Windows on USB drive to use it in a portable version .
If you prefer to avoid starting a computer from a USB stick, you can still copy your favorite programs in a portable version on the stick so that you can use them on any PC without leaving traces and as if it were ours.
These are applications, made from a single file or from a folder, that must not be installed and that you only need to run to use them.
Almost all well-known programs offer portable versions for Windows and work, for the most part, identically to the normal versions.
While in another article I had already listed the best portable programs for USB sticks among which we can find LibreOffice, Sumatra PDF, Notepad ++, Skype, 7Zip, Irfanview and many others, including portable browsers such as Chrome and Firefox
Even better is the use of an organized launcher of portable applications such as PortableApps or Liberkey, which allows you to easily save the files created on the USB stick.
Finally, if you really wanted a PC as big as a USB stick, today this is possible by buying a Chromebit or an Intel Stick, with the difference that the Chromebit has a ChromeOS operating system while the Intel Sticks have Windows.
To this type of mini PC just connect a screen and a Wifi keyboard to work wherever you want.
