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Live11: Run Windows 11 without Installing, Directly from Your USB or DVD

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NTDev is well-known for developing lightweight Windows 11 to run on computers with fewer resources. You may have heard of the Tiny11 or Tiny10. It is based on the official Windows 11 ISO, but the developer stripped down several unnecessary features and components to make it a smaller and more lightweight OS that can be run on fewer or older computers.

Today, the same developer released a lighter-weight version of Windows 11, even lighter than Tiny11. This is a more viable alternative to Windows 11 for users with low-resource power computers. As of these days, Microsoft keeps bundling several features and packages, which make the ISO file more than 4GB, whereas Live11 is easy to store on a 4GB USB drive.

Live11 is a very portable

He uses the Grub4Dos project, a free and open-source boot loader that can be used to boot an operating system from DOS or a USB drive. Also, he uses an SVBus driver to allow Grub4Dos to access SCSI and USB devices. Because of these methods, NTDev allows Live11 to be booted from a DVD or USB drive.

This is in its alpha stage (early access) and is still being developed for Live11. It is currently released as a proof of concept, and developers are working on fixing these issues. There are some known issues, like that it only works with MBR/BIOS devices and requires 8GB of RAM, despite the ISO image only requiring 4GB of RAM. This is understandable, given the size and complexity of Windows 11.

Other functionalities, like VMWare and Hyper-V, work with Live11. Indeed, you can run this version of Windows on a DVD.

Run Windows 11 without installing

Do you know that Windows 95 runs on a floppy disk? You had to insert the disc whenever you needed to boot your computer. But now, you need to install the OS on your computer to use it faster. Now, the same functionality can be used with Live11. It’s pretty handy for those who don’t want to install Windows on their computer or don’t want to install Windows 11. This gives you the flexibility to run Windows 11, especially on low-end computers.

This is a stripped-down version of Windows 11 and doesn’t require users to have TPM or a Microsoft account. This read-only experience will be installed with a local account under the username and administrator.

You can run it directly on your virtual machine, or it can also be used on a computer, but it won’t support Oracle VirtualBox. When you run Live11 on your computer, it directly gets you to Grub4DOS Boot, and after selecting Live11, it will ask you to choose the language and the country, along with the keyboard layout and privacy settings. After selecting your preferences, you need to wait for it to finish installing.

Download Live11 to run Windows 11 on your ROM directly from a USB flash drive.

This is based on Windows 11 Pro Build 22621.1555, which packs a few apps like Notepad, Snipping Tool, and Terminal. It doesn’t come with Microsoft Edge, but you can run Portable Firefox pre-installed and choose any other alternative options.

After downloading, you can write the image to your USB flash drive or any microSD card to run Windows 11. For this, all you need is a DVD or flash drive with a 4.78GB capacity, as the image weighs around 4.4GB, which means there is about 319MB of free space when you finish installing, whereas the 3.99GB installs on a RAM disc, which could get filled up with temporary files.

However, you can’t save any settings or install apps permanently because it doesn’t write to disk. It only uses 1.89 GB of RAM. If you download anything, storing the file on another drive is recommended, as the primary drive only has 300 MB of free space.