Over the weekend I was at the Wal-Mart picking up a few things and noticed over in the electronics dept. they had 2GB Sandisk USB sticks on sale. $12.88 a piece. Cheap enough as far as I’m concerned so I bought one.

I had 2 purposes for buying the stick.

1. It’s better than the 512MB I have (one can never have too much space).
2. I wanted to try out a "full" Linux distribution booted off USB installed via UNetbootin.

Last week I tried this out with smaller distros, but now that I had a full 2GB at my disposal I could try the CD-sized distributions. So of course I installed Linux Mint "live" mode on the stick and gave it a go.

Here’s what I have to report:

Now that I’ve experienced what it’s like to run a CD-sized distro off a USB stick, I can honestly say that this beats the ever-lovin’ crap out of using an optical disc. It is faster and smoother all around in operation, and quiet. No annoying spin-up/spin-down noises whatsoever.

If given the option I will always use this method of booting a live Linux distro over using the disc. No question. I highly recommend that if your computer has the ability to boot off USB, are curious about Linux and hate running anything off the optical drive, use this method.

Side note about UNetbootin: If you’re asking "can I make my USB an emergency bootable repair tool?" Absolutely. It supports NTPasswd, FreeDOS, Smart Boot Manager and several others. Like I said, if you can boot off USB, use the stick instead. See the UNetbootin web site for details on that.

7-Zip is a file archiving application. Remember WinZIP or PKZIP? Think of 7-Zip like that.

This app is not pretty but it sure is easy. In fact, it’s so easy that it sometimes confuses people. When you install it, all you have to do to create a ZIP or 7z file is just right-click a file, a selection of files or a folder, choose 7-Zip from the context menu and create your ZIP file. That’s all there is to it.

7-Zip will easily open files created by other archive programs such as WinZIP. It will also recognize archive types from Linux such as TAR and GZIP (very handy).

The only archive type others use that 7-Zip does not support (to the best of my knowledge) is RAR. WinRAR is available for that (but it’s not free).

JKDefrag is a file defragmentation utility for Windows. It is free and very ugly-looking but does the job very, very well. When you download this application it doesn’t get any easier as far as ease-of-use is concerned. There is nothing to install. Just double-click the JKDefrag.exe executable file and it starts doing its thing. This will surprise some people because most don’t expect an app to just work like this without some sort of installation first - but JKDefrag does what it’s supposed to do. You double-click and just wait until it’s finished. That’s it. Nothing else to do. It’s that easy.

See video below for an example of what to expect.