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I use the optical drive mainly for reinstalling OS. An old habit carried over from the Windows time. Later I discovered that OS X is probably the easiest OS to
by riobard 16y ago
I use the optical drive mainly for reinstalling OS. An old habit carried over from the Windows time. Later I discovered that OS X is probably the easiest OS to install from alternative media. (It is probably also the easiest to run from alternative media too. Tried portable hard drive and USB stick. Works flawlessly.)
I did three clean installation of OS X 10.6. I tried both installing from DVD, and installing from an image of the DVD residing on a partition of a portable hard drive (created with the system default Disk Utility tool) via USB. The hard drive option is much faster, quieter, and cooler (pun intended).
I am always wondering if Apple will ship an OS on a tiny USB stick instead of a stupid DVD disc some day.
I hate optical discs and drives. Mechanical and fragile. I want to go all solid state.
- maguay 16y agoYou can install Windows 7 from a USB flash disk (or external hard drive if you wanted to) with the Windows 7 USB tool. Works great and installs much faster than from a DVD. Even on my desktop, I haven't used disks to install software in forever. Hey, you can even download a trial of Office, Photoshop, or almost any major software, and then activate it with a key from a physical package. Works great.
- riobard 16y agoI tried that too on some PC's around. It's a nice feature given the need to reinstall the OS more often... There are some compatibility issues with USB booting on different BIOS, but other than that it is really helpful. Now the next question is how do you run Win7 from a USB stick...
- maguay 16y agoI've done it with XP back in the day, but never tried it with Win7. That might make an interesting project...