When you’re troubleshooting your computer or installing a new operating system, you may need to “boot from a disc” or USB device (like an external hard drive or flash drive). Here’s what ...

A bootable USB key is a convenient way to install operating systems on netbooks without optical drives, or carrying around a Live OS with you at all times. It especially makes sense if you're ...

For more on why you might want to do this, see Boot discs explained: An overview of booting your PC from something other than your hard drive. For what to do when your PC won’t boot this way ...

Early versions of the Raspberry Pi could only boot from SD cards, but newer ones can boot from any USB device, like an external drive or USB stick. Here's how.

Unplug unnecessary devices Another easy thing you can do to speed up your start-ups is make sure that you don't have any unnecessary USB devices plugged into your computer.

What do you use your USB flash drive for? How about maintaining a Windows computer? Parted Magic is a nifty partitioning tool that also includes a suite of other useful utilities.

USB drives might seem too small to be useful beyond transferring files, but they have big potential. Try some of these solutions before throwing one out.