Getting Live USB sticks to boot consistently

Occasionally I like to boot my desktop running Windows from a USB stick to try out the latest version of a Linux distribution on hardware – as opposed to running it in VirtualBox. I remember that this used to be straightforward on my old Acer laptop, but it’s hit and miss on my desktop. I’ve not quite figured out why boot-from-USB fails occasionally, but I’ve found great way around it.

Enter the plop boot manager. Install this nifty little tool and it gives you a boot menu before windows starts up. You can now select your USB stick and it should boot, provided that unetbootin or a similar tool did it’s job.