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My primary machine is an Ubuntu laptop, but I need to have access to windows when I travel for conferences to run PowerPoint and Illustrator, and occasionally other software.

With my current setup this necessitates bringing a second Windows machine just to use these pieces of software. Since I have the Windows machine anyway, I occasionally boot up games. It would be convenient if I could instead just carry a 256 GB USB 3.0 drive with Windows and a few pieces of software on it for exclusive use when traveling.

My question is how responsive will Windows 10 be from a USB 3.0 boot?

My instinct tells me that even with 3.0 it'll be noticeably slower than on a dedicated drive/partition, but I'm curious if anyone has any experience with this, specifically using Windows To Go or some such software.

Is image editing software or other GPU intensive software such as gaming a miserable experience? Assuming I have a modern GPU, what kind of games could be run from such a setup?

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  • barriboy,I can predict you won't like the slowness. If you will click edit and advise the make of your laptop, and the model from the serial number plate, we can see if a second drive can be added internally with no speed penalty. If not, a dual boot, or a virtualized Windows running under OpenBox or VMware would be the way to go.
    – K7AAY
    Commented Aug 20, 2019 at 23:49

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It is a nuisance to get any version of Windows on a USB flash drive other than bare-bones WinPE. Windows-to-Go is deprecated (one might say it's up-and-gone).

Dual-boot is a better option, particularly if Windows had been installed and its partition is still there. If there's no Windows partition, then you'll need to buy a license, download the ISO, and create bootable media.

However, you could use equivalent software for Linux, and avoid needing a second OS:

Finally, some Windows software, such as IrfanView, run well in wine on Linux.

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