Windows To Go - All You Need to Know About It
A bootable thumb drive that can run Windows 8 on almost any PC, any number of times? That's what Windows To Go is all about and we detail the finer matters from how it works, to requirements and initial experience.
By Vijay Anand -
Enabling the Next Stage to a More Mobile Workforce?
Ever since the developer preview edition of Windows 8 became available late last year, one of the key highlights of the upcoming OS was the ability to create a bootable USB thumb drive with Windows 8 and be able to run the OS off the thumb drive. What’s more, unlike the quirky workarounds required to create an equivalent for Windows 7 and then needing to cross fingers if it would work properly, Windows 8 on the move is quite adaptable to various systems and will come with a proper tool (on the Windows 8 Enterprise edition) to crank out a portable Windows 8 drive.
This is the new Windows To Go feature and we caught a neat overview of it, including a surprising resume capability when the drive was dislodged from the port - all this and more while we attended Microsoft’s TechEd Europe 2012 over at Amsterdam. So check out this video if you haven’t yet caught it:-

Windows To Go - The Usage Proposition
Now before we get into further details, we share with you more on why this option came about. It’s more than just making a convenient, portable and bootable Windows device.
The key goal for Windows to Go (WTG) is to create a mobile work space within an organization (access corporate workspace, execute applications and store/retrieve documents), without requiring a fixed computing asset tied to each employee.
Given the right provisions, it allows enterprises to provide a full corporate work environment that is completely separate from the host machine and is a non virtualized environment - all this bootable off a USB drive. Throw in enterprise management tools to govern group domain policies like Active Directory or Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), and you’ll be able to log into your corporate network from almost any location or system. Not much information was made available if this solution can work outside of a Microsoft back-end administration at this point of time.
Traditionally, you would have to rely on a virtualized solution that would require the host PC to have the right configuration and software. Furthermore, supporting such an infrastructure is either expensive for the company or too troublesome to manage for end-users. Not to mention, the bandwidth required to have a reasonable experience.
With WTG, you get a fully usable system-on-disk kind of solution - minus the hardware needed to run the operating system. Here are some scenarios where WTG would be of high value:-
- You’re on leave for the day and left your company laptop at office, but it just so happens that you need to forward an important document to your client that’s saved on your corporate LAN. Assuming you have WTG issued by your company, you could use any system at home to boot up, log in to your corporate network and the problem is resolved. This wouldn’t require your home systems to have any prior setup or software. In fact, they are untouched at the OS level, other than using your hardware as the host.
- With the bring your own device (BYOD) momentum getting ever more pronounced, WTG allows you to use your notebook of choice while not messing anything up; so that when your work is done, you can then boot into your usual desktop, complete with games and what-not.
- For company operations that often deal with contract or temporary staff, all that’s needed are spare systems and company issued WTG system on a disk. If properly commissioned with BitLocker, should the drive go missing, there’s no cause for concern because it would be useless without the right key.
- Some organizations are spread across several office locations and a seat-less solution would be more convenient for staff members that frequently have to travel. This would again take advantage of company issued WTG USB based sticks and a readily available pool of systems.
How does a Windows To Go Device Work?
Imagine that your host PC’s hard drive is ignored completely and it runs completely off the thumb drive. This is exactly what happens when using a WTG device, using the host PC’s hardware, minus its internal hard drives. You are essentially getting the full Windows 8 Enterprise OS to run on the external media. As such, it pretty much has the full set of capabilities as a regular Windows 8 system.
Windows To Go actually disables all of the host’s internal hard drives by default. As seen here, only the WTG device running off a 32GB thumb drive and the host system’s 4GB thumb drive are visible.
You could enable the local machine’s hard drive manually if required via the disk management options. We’ll let the power users decide on their preferences.
This prevents data leakage and not needing to worry of the state of the host machine if it’s virus-free or what-not. Interestingly though, you could still plug in other external drives on the host machine and those are made accessible. Of course, if the Windows To Go system needs to be more secure, corporate group policies can be applied from an IT admin level accordingly to control or restrict access to these drives.
Those deployed by enterprises will undoubtedly be equipped with BitLocker drive encryption technologies for a password key protector before the WTG device is unlocked to commence booting.
Of course, all this is only possible if the host system is configured to support booting from USB drives in the first place. This means, many publicly accessible systems like in a library, hotel and others are out of luck as more likely than not, they would have had those options disabled with a password barrier to even tamper the BIOS. So beware of this simple but important limitation on usability.
One small note on hibernation - this ability is disabled by default on WTG (which means you can manually override this if you choose to do so). The reasoning for this is to prevent a scenario when the WTG device is hibernated and you unplug it without realizing its state and plug it in to another system. This is a recipe for messing up the hibernated file on the device. To prevent this, Microsoft decided to disable hibernation on the WTG device.
Plugging / Unplugging Matters of a WTG Device
Speaking of unplugging the WTG device, you should only unplug it after shutting down your WTG workspace to ensure data is properly written to it. However, should you forget to shutdown your session and just unplugged the drive and left, the WTG workspace is configured to auto-shutdown in 60 seconds from the time the WTG thumb drive is unplugged.
But what if you didn’t intend to take out the WTG device but it was accidentally knocked out or plucked out by your toddler? No sweat, within 60 seconds, just plug the device back in to the same USB port used previously and the system will resume your session as if nothing had happened. This was demoed by Microsoft as captured in the video on the earlier page.
WTG was designed to handle unintended device removal in mind.
Host System Requirements for WTG to Work Effectively
Here are the system requirements to use WTG devices according to Microsoft:-
- Works best with Windows 7 and Windows 8 logo program certified systems for best experience.
- Systems configured for USB booting at the BIOS level. And for ease of use, it should be set as the top priority in the boot order preference.
- Works with UEFI or legacy BIOS equipped system firmware.
- Works with USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 ports (conditions apply)
While Microsoft states that it works best with systems certified by them, what we can grasp from this point is that its hardware requirements aren’t any different from running existing Windows operating systems.
Officially (at this point of time), they won’t be supporting systems that aren’t in the logo certified program. If you read this note carefully, it doesn’t mean that it will not run on non-certified systems. Rather, it just means if something goes wrong, they are not liable to extend you support - that’s all.
We bet, your next query would be if it will run on Apple systems. Needless to say, they are not able to comment on this point. However, as many online users have found, the developer preview edition worked just fine on several Apple systems. We can’t be sure if this will hold true (for better or worse) after the final release of the OS is out, so do wait for our update on this later this year.
Hardware Specs of a WTG Device
For the launch of Windows 8, Microsoft has partnered with both Kingston and Super Talent to seed the market with appropriate Windows To Go compliant drives.
To preserve the usage experience for the user, WTG certified devices would require more stringent hardware requirements than normal thumb drives or external storage drives for that matter. Here are the recommendations from Microsoft:-
- First and foremost, WTG compliant drives should use SSD flash memory. Normal inexpensive thumb drives uses much cheaper flash and controller components that are geared for sequential read throughput. To provide the performance of a local machine, the WTG drives require high random read/write throughput speeds with an appropriate controller akin to those used on SSD drives. As such, we don’t expect WTG devices to be affordable initially.
- WTG devices require high endurance memory.
- To be recognized as a fixed media unit, rather than a removable drive to support multi-partitions like a regular fixed drive.
- Minimum capacity of 32GB. With the OS itself occupying slightly over half of that capacity, this leaves a bit of space to store data and a couple of big applications if required. Other capacity points of 64GB and 128GB will be available in the future.
- It should preferably be a USB 3.0 device, though USB 2.0 works just as well. Considering SSD flash performance, USB 2.0 should be decently fast as well.
Now, the above are just recommendations laid out by Microsoft for best experience, though it doesn’t stop anyone from using other USB media such as an external 1TB portable drive to setup a WTG device. We’ll find out in due time how much of an experience impact would such devices have on WTG usability. With regards to devices that are WTG certified, Microsoft has yet to publish this at the point of writing. It will be made known closer to the availability of the final OS.
A Quick Experience of WTG with an Old PC
To prove our earlier point that WTG can work on much more stingy hardware than those certified by Microsoft, we plugged a WTG device (a Kingston DT Ultimate 32GB thumb drive) issued to us from Microsoft into a pretty old system. The system was configured with an Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2160, an Intel G965 original desktop board, 3GB of RAM and an 80GB Seagate hard drive. Note that while the thumb drive is USB 3.0, the guinea pig host machine only supports USB 2.0.
We plugged the drive to a free USB 2.0 port on the machine, booted the system, ensured that it is set to boot from this USB device first and that’s about it. Windows 8 was on its way to getting initialized:-
About 30 seconds through the boot process, we were greeted with the driver initialization stage as it configured base drives compatible to boot Windows 8.
At about one minute and four seconds, the boot process completed, showing us this Start screen. However, it wasn’t quite done with loading a complete set of drivers and initializing them; screen resolution seemed like a low 1024 x 768 pixels resolution.
Within a further 30 seconds, the system finally finished initializing all drivers and even auto configured the display to support its native 1080p resolution.
This is the system properties tab in case you’re interested.
So given the six-year old system’s lowly configuration, it took just a little over a minute for the very first boot into Windows 8 with a further 30 seconds of background updates to fully ready the system. Though the total time span taken to ready the system was more than acceptable on this old machine, this only applies for the very first boot as the OS profiles and stores the system’s configuration.
Further cold boots resulted in a much speedier 45 seconds boot timing – measured when Windows 8 started loading to when the Start screen showed up. That’s nearly two times faster than the very first run, after considering the extended time required to fully configure the system for optimal usage.
Skand Mittal, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Desktop Virtualization and Windows 8 Enterprise for Microsoft mentioned that the system profiling process for any new system is much well handled on Windows 8 and as such you can pretty much go about plugging your WTG device on multiple machines and not worry about corrupting the OS within. Since WTG identifies and profiles each PC uniquely, further usage of the WTG device on any of these pre-profiled systems will greatly speed up the boot process - just like we found out.
So the boot up process is fast. What about overall user experience of various applications? We’re happy to report that casual usage was very quick and snappy even for a system of this age. Here are a few candid snapshots from our brief usage:-
The full apps list that is available on a clean OS.
Having HardwareZone open in IE10 on the side tab while launching the weather app in the foreground.
And that's all we've for now. Stay tuned for more updates of this topic in the near future.
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