Feature Articles

Windows To Go - All You Need to Know About It

By Vijay Anand - 2 Jul 2012

A Quick Experience of WTG with an Old PC

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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