There are endless flavors of "Linux on a stick," tasty downloadable versions of that OS which run from removable storage and let you take Linus' progeny for a spin without dedicating any of your partitions to the cause. There have been ways of making this work with Windows , too, but now Microsoft is getting into the game properly. That leaked version of Windows 8 we looked at recently contains a feature called Portable Workspaces, which enables you to take a 16GB (or greater) external storage device and dump a bootable, runnable copy of Win 8 on there. It remains to be seen just how many copies one could create, and whether they ever expire or, indeed, whether they can themselves be copied onto an HDD like a ghost image, but it's easy to see this as a boon for support personnel. Well, support personnel of the future, anyway.[Thanks, Peter]