Overcome IT Lab Challenge in COVID-19 with Windows-to-Go

In the transition of courses from face-to-face to distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, students doing labs at home becomes a major challenge. In this paper, we proposed a feasible solution of building a low-cost portable IT laboratory with Windows-to-Go installed on a USB 3.1 flash drive. To verify the feasibility and usability of this portable IT laboratory, we setup two systems on a single test computer for performance comparison — Windows-to-Go installed on a USB 3.1 flash drive and Windows 10 installed on an internal SSD. Focusing on the needs of IT discipline, we manually compared the performance of installing, executing normal IT software and other common IT tasks on both systems. We also compared their performance benchmarks by PassMark. The experiment results show that this low-cost portable IT laboratory can be used as a candidate solution for students doing labs at home.