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MyPocketXP - Windows XP On A Flash Drive

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
by Chris Pirillo

Gnomie Arend Dittmer writes:

Hi Chris,

Love to watch your YouTube postings and hear your perspective on all things technology. I was wondering if you could take a product I have recently come up with for a test drive.

The product is called MyPocketXP. It is an appliance that includes a UI and virtual machine configuration software, a WindowsXP installation on a virtual hard disk and an 8G USB flash drive that stores all of this. The product runs with Microsoft Virtual PC and VMware Player and works on all versions of XP and Vista.

OK… so what’s the big deal? Anybody can install a virtual machine and pack it on a USB drive.

Well, yes … the key problem with just putting a virtual hard disk of an OS on a USB drive is the USB drive’s longevity and the OS performance. Flash drives have limited number of write/erase cycles they can sustain — even more important — write performance is very slow, particularly for random access, which is what you see with an OS in operation. I have tried running Windows XP directly from the USB flash drive and it was pretty much unusable.

MyPocketXP configures Virtual PC/VMware Player to write to the hosts system’s file system which means at least 3x improved write performance. After MyPocketXP is shut down, the user can decide if the changes should be written back or not. MyPocketXP also separates user and system data and stores them on two virtual hard drives. In a typical use case you install your applications and then never write back changes to the ’system’. This way your installation always stays ‘clean’ and viruses never survive a reboot. The Windows license is a legit OEM license so this is fully legal and MS gets its share.

MyPocketXP is easy to use. It has its own launch menu so that the user does not have to interface with Virtual PC or VMware. It autodetects VMware and VPC, automatically configures the VM, and starts up with the click of a button. If there is no Virtual Machine platform installed, the installation of Microsoft Virtual PC can be launched from the launch menu (The setup.exe is downloaded in a guided download when MyPocketXP is inserted into a system for the first time).

You can check out more at mypocketxp.com.

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