A bootable Mac OS X thumb drive comes in handy when you need to troubleshoot OS issues for yourself, your family, or your friends.

Fancy a go at building your own operating system? A course teaching the basics of building an OS has been released for the $40 Raspberry Pi computer.

The newest version of Virtual PC supports USB peripherals and are supposed to be able to support 64-bit operating systems within the VM as well. Either way, get the right edition for your machine.

You can create a portable PC on a USB stick and run it from anywhere. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to do it with Linux.