Windows 8 to Make USB Portable Workspace
Windows 8 on a stick.
Linux has had OS installations that reside on USB thumb drives for a while now, and it seems that Microsoft is going to be making Windows 8 able to do the same trick.
The early copy of Windows 8 that was leaked earlier this week – which turned out to be real – gave an early glimpse at a feature called "Portable Workspace Creator."
The feature is described as:
"Portable Workspace is a Windows feature that allows you to run Windows from a USB storage device."
Those wishing to make a Portable Workspace will need a USB stick with at lest 16 GB free.
It also lists a requirement of having access to Windows 8 Enterprise Edition installation files, so this could be a feature made for business IT and not just for personal users. Perhaps Microsoft is restricting it somehow over concerns of casual piracy.
Microsoft hasn't officially talked about this new feature at all, but hopefully it will detail Portable Workspace, as well as other features like History Vault, soon.

Oh jeez, give it a rest. Who hasnt borrowed ideas from the competition at this point?
Except for the fact this live image requires 16GB instead of
it makes for some interesting scenarios
Yeah 1GB of useless stuff...
thats WAY TOOO BIG.
it will run and boot up reaaaaaaallly reaaally slow.
and there is no way that u can copy it into the ram....at the time when windows 8 will be released.
in fact with virtualization you could deploy direct to your college's desktop, you can use his existing logon to start a VM and deploy your workspace directly into that
it be feature like this that would really make an enterprise edition more then just an OS with better network features, although they may have to slow it's development down a bit..... otherwise corporates might just skip win7 and jump straight to win8 lol
not required for a corporate setup, the majority of corporates would run a 80-90% homogenous setup, that is to say 80-90% of the applications would be on the majority of all the machines
I tend to think of it more like MobileWorkSpace posted earlier. It's listed as a portable workspace but I would have to assume some of the user's files are going to be there in addition to the OS files. Maybe it will be like a portable, roaming profile. In that case the 16GB seems reasonable, especially if other programs move over with it.
i dont believe it would be a stand alone win8 installation, it would probably utilize an existing win8 installation and inject itself into that
in fact if you really think about it the possibilities are really interesting, the windows experience may come in two parts, the core would be installed onto a machine (whether x86 or ARM based), instead of logging in you would instead virtualize a workspace inside that core, the workspace would adapt based upon the core it has virtualized into, for instance a tablet would get cloud stuff, a desktop maybe gaming, it would mean a single profile that can roam across different hardware..... imagine a smartphone (easily have over 16GB of space) can be used to login and virtualize your workspace into any machine
ok back to reality....
Winsxs and drivers mainly.
Yes, useless stuff like video players, audio players, browsers and the like! But no anti-virus???? I wonder why? After taking two hours to "Fix" a friends laptop because he was stupid enough to click on a pop up window that offered a free anti-virus package I will stick with my useless Linux distribution and leave you to hours of jittery video and stalling programs because your computer is running a virus scan.