Every live OS review glows about the tools. This page covers the other half — the built-in limits of the whole category: sessions that forget everything, drivers that may not exist, and the class of problems no USB toolkit can repair. Knowing the limits is what separates a tool you trust from a tool that surprises you mid-job.
A live OS is a workshop, not a miracle. AnkhTech is a capable one, but it lives under the same rules as Strelec, MediCat and every other Windows PE toolkit — and the video's “lightweight and fast” claim, like all such claims, has conditions. This page states the limits plainly so you can plan around them instead of discovering them on a customer's PC.
The first surprise for new users: the live desktop forgets everything. Files downloaded in the session, settings changed, Wi-Fi passwords entered — all of it vanishes at restart. This is not a missing feature. Amnesia is what makes a live OS trustworthy: every boot is a clean, known-good system, and nothing a previous job left behind can interfere with the next one.
The working habit it forces is simple — treat the live session as a workbench, and store every result on a real drive as you go.
A live system carries a generic driver set, not your PC's exact drivers. AnkhTech works on this problem — its builds include a driver installer with growing Wi-Fi support, and the Mini boot added network and sound support — but gaps remain: an unusual Wi-Fi chip, a brand-new storage controller or a specialist device may simply not work in the session.
The technician's answers are boring and effective: use a cable instead of Wi-Fi, move the stick to another port, or accept that this one job needs the toolkit's other edition. What you should not expect is to install a full vendor driver suite into a live session and have it behave like installed Windows.
Because the desktop looks like Windows, beginners sometimes ask why not just use the live OS every day. The honest answer: no persistence, no Windows Update, no proper user accounts, reduced driver support, and performance limited by the USB stick and RAM. It is a workshop you visit, not a house you live in.
It also cannot run everything. Programs that demand full Windows services, heavyweight runtimes, anti-cheat systems or modern games are outside what any Windows PE environment offers — the toolkit's small bundled games exist to pass time during long scans, which tells you the intended workload.
"Lightweight and fast" describes the Mini edition and a Full edition running on a healthy PC with enough RAM. Load the Full toolkit on a 2 GB RAM machine through a slow USB 2.0 stick and it will crawl — the same is true of every PE toolkit on this channel, which is why editions exist. Judge any live OS on the machine class you actually service, and keep the light edition ready for the old hardware that fills real repair benches.
See where the toolkit is strong in the full test — then weigh it against the limits on this page.
▶️ Watch Full VideoBecause the live system keeps nothing from a session unless you save it to a real drive. The live desktop and its folders live in memory. Copy results to the internal drive's data folders, an external disk or a network share before you shut down — that is the standard working habit in any live OS.
Not the way you install into Windows. A live session has no installer permanence — anything installed exists only until restart. Technicians carry portable versions of their extra tools on the same stick instead, and open them from the stick inside the session.
Most likely the live system's driver set does not include your exact wireless chip. AnkhTech has been widening its Wi-Fi driver support in recent builds, but the reliable bench answer is an Ethernet cable — wired networking works on far more hardware, and repair work rarely needs to be wireless.