Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive

February 25
HOWTO: Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive
UPDATE: MARCH 19, 2007Wow. I've discovered that this post has been viewed by a lot of people other than my customers which frankly was quite a surprise. How do you guys find this stuff? I thought because there seems to be a lot more people than originally intended reading this entry, I'd clarify a few points for prospective "installers", particularly around the "time-to-install" that I'd blurted out at the end of this original post (which has since been edited out):
1) YOUR MILEAGE MY VARYIt seems that performance for USB peripherals within PCs vary tremendously between machines. I'm not referring to the bandwidth of USB 2.0 mind you, but rather the performance of USB peripherals when working on different brands of PCs. USB ports on PCs seem to be connected to I/O buses that have widely varying performance depending on the manufacturer. For example, I have two different laptops and both of them boot off of USB Flash Drives, but one of them, when I tried the USB flash drive boot, installed Windows Vista relatively slowly whereas the other one was nice & fast. Hence - YMMV.
2) NO REAL BENCHMARKS.A "10 minute install" is not a real benchmark. It's a number I just guesstimated because I noticed that the install ran noticably much faster than when I did the install from DVD. This was suppposed to be just a fun geeky thing for IT guys to try out and use for their test lab PCs. After all, many of us have dreamed of doing this at one time or another for convenience purposes.
I never intended on this being a really scientific analysis/time-test for installing Windows Vista so please don't take any numbers I wrote as gospel thinking that your company's Windows Vista deployment should use USB drives because you think you can lower your install time by x%, minimizing your cost of deployment by y%, and reducing your Windows Vista TCO by z%. I haven't run any real benchmarks. This was supposed to be just something nice for my customer's IT guys to try, okay?