Summary

• Easily create a live Windows 11 USB with Rufus for testing before installation.
• Live USB offers portability but faces slow speeds and update issues.
• Gaming on live USB works with GPU drivers but may result in compatibility hurdles.

From the uber-popular Ubuntu to its more obscure rivals like Elementary OS and O4OS, most Linux distributions support the live USB facility. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, the live USB facility lets you boot into the operating system and test it out before installing it on a storage drive.

But since Windows 11 doesn’t support this facility, you’ll need to install the OS from the bootable drive before you can use it. Or at least, that’s usually the case when you’re installing Microsoft’s flagship operating system by following the standard procedure. As it turns out, the disk flashing tool Rufus not only lets you set up a live version of Windows 11 but also lets you configure persistent storage for the drive, meaning any changes made to the OS get saved to the USB disk.

While it sounds good on paper, the lack of proper updates, limited storage capacity, and disgustingly slow transfer speeds can make the experience quite painful. Knowing all these issues beforehand, I still decided to experiment with a live Windows 11 USB – and here are all my findings.

Creating a live USB drive was a piece of cake...

...And using it to install Windows 11 was a test of patience

If you’ve read my tutorials on XDA, you may already be familiar with Rufus, a tool that can write ISO files onto flash drives to create bootable disks. Apart from its usual features, Rufus also lets you switch the Image option to Windows To Go when you select a Windows 11 ISO – and the facility serves as the crux of this experiment.

The rest of the procedure is the same as creating a normal bootable USB drive, and all I did was pick the default settings for my 128GB USB 3.2 flash drive. However, I encountered the first hurdle after clicking the Start button: the progress bar was moving at a snail’s pace. Whereas the average Windows 11 bootable disk is ready within a few minutes, Rufus easily took over 15 minutes to create the live USB drive. Regardless, once the setup was finished, I entered the BIOS on my target system and switched to the live USB to launch the Windows OOBE. But the abysmally low speed of the drive caused the wizard to take over 30 minutes to load. By now you should get used to reading this statement about long loading times because that’s going to be a recurring theme throughout the article.

The overall UI was moderately responsive

But everything went downhill the moment any process had to write something on the live USB

After waiting for what felt like an eternity, I finally landed on the Windows 11 desktop. Within seconds, I got a page file warning, though adding some page memory didn't do much. MY 10GbE NIC had also stopped working, but that’s because I had yet to install the drivers on this variant of Windows 11. Aside from these minor issues, nothing seemed out of the ordinary with the OS. In fact, the user interface was surprisingly responsive instead of being a total lagfest. While it doesn't hold a candle to the lightning-fast speed of an SSD, the live version of Windows 11 could open multiple tabs in Edge without any lag whatsoever.

However, everything became a mess when I attempted to perform any action that involved writing to the disk. Thanks to the slow write speeds of the USB drive, installing Chrome took longer than usual, while the Windows Updates were completely broken. Therefore, there was no way to upgrade to the latest version of Windows 11. Undeterred by these problems, I decided to install some of the usual apps on the live USB.

Although installing Gimp, Krita, and Blender took ages, I didn’t encounter too many performance issues when running them on my system. And just as things had started to look up for this experiment, I had a power cut. However, due to the accursed Windows Updates, rebooting into the OS took ages, and I had to wait over forty minutes for my PC to enter the Windows 11 desktop. But with most of my daily apps running without any issues, this seemed like a decent stopping point, right? Absolutely not, because with 50 GB of free space, I just had to try running games on the live USB!

Light 2D games work well on a live Windows 11 USB

And the performance goes up a notch after installing GPU drivers

The first step to turning the live version of Windows 11 into a gaming machine involved installing Steam. Setting up the game platform took more than a few minutes, but signing in to my account didn’t take too long. I started installing some of the lighter 2D games in my library. GNOSIA worked well without any tweaks, and so did Startbound. However, Terraria was rather laggy, but that’s because I hadn’t installed the drivers for my Intel Arc A750 yet.

So, my next task was to somehow get the drivers working. This didn't require a lot of effort on my part, as all I had to do was run the installer wizard and wait for almost an hour for it to set up the drivers. And despite how wacky it sounds, the drivers worked perfectly well and the frame rate got a major boost in Terraria. Next, I tried installing Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights, and the game ran just as well. Unfortunately, Disco Elysium would crash after picking the facets inside the character creator, though emulators like PPSSPP ran without any issues.

With most of the games working, I had to complete one last test: using the live USB on another system. For me, the ability to carry a working version of Windows 11 with me where I go was the main appeal behind this experiment. But installing the drivers for my Intel GPU meant I’d have to face compatibility issues if I tried using the live USB with a system armed with a different GPU.

But before I unplugged the drive, I disabled the Windows Update, because waiting another forty minutes for Windows to boot would erode any remaining vestiges of my sanity. With that out of the way, I plugged the live USB into my Xeon-powered server PC and modified the BIOS of the X99 motherboard to boot from this drive. And it somehow worked. Sure, the resolution was a bit of a mess, but removing the Intel drivers and installing the correct drivers for my Nvidia GTX 1080 fixed everything. So, I’m happy to say the experiment was a resounding success.

Should you run Windows 11 off a live USB?

For the average user who wants a fast and responsive experience, there’s absolutely no need to subject yourself to this ordeal. However, there are certain perks to using a live version of Windows 11. If you’re working with sensitive and highly confidential files, you can install Windows-To-Go on a small USB drive and unplug it from the system once you’re done with your work. Likewise, a Windows 11 live USB can be useful in situations when you’re unable to access the boot drive on your system. But for those who don’t have the patience of a saint, I advise staying away from this experiment.