Many years ago I was very intrigued when I found out that you can run a computer with an operating system from a CD/DVD, all while not touching the hard drive or even needing the hard drive. Today this done using a USB drive which runs much faster than an optical drive thanks to USB 3.1.
How this works is the computer loads the OS from the thumb drive and creates a virtual hard drive in RAM. So, instead of it running the operating system from the hard drive, it runs from a partition in RAM. The best part is when things start acting unusual all you have to do is reboot and start over or try a different version of Linux. I use this to tryout or test different programs to see which ones I like or work for the application I need like Atom. After I find what I want I reboot to clean the ones I don't.
This is done with a tool called Yumi from www.pendrivelinux.com. Yumi is a Windows based tool that allows you to install Linux distributions on there based on the space of the USB. It will also allow you to change the distributions without having to redo the entire USB.
After downloading Yumi and running it from Windows, the best place to download Linux distributions is www.distrowatch.com. This website has years of Linux distros logged on file from Arch Linux to UBUNTU, all the way back to 2001 which was pretty close to when I started visiting this site. One of the first distros I started with was a credit card distro called DSL or Damn Small Linux due to it being about 200MB and it was able to fit on a credit card size CD. Thanks to to my 56k dial up modem, it was one of the easiest ones to download but still took almost an hour.
Once you have a Linux distro on the USB you need to be able to boot from it. Some computers require you to change the BIOS settings, while others are capable of temporarily changing the boot option with a function key. If you Google your PC for alternate boot options it will tell you if a function key will allow you to boot your computer.
If you did all that you should be up and running with Linux. A lot of people are intimidated by Linux because they think it is 100% terminal based but tend to be surprised it is actually GUI (graphical user interface) based. My distro of choice is KNOPPIX. This distro is not for the faint of heart due ot the tools it comes with but for the most part the basic stuff is like Windows. I love to use it for troubleshooting PC's and networks along with everyday internet surfing.
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