Run XP / Vista from a USB flash memory on my Macbook Air

Hello!
Does anyone know if it is possible to boot and run XP directly from a USB stick?
I am fairly new to Mac. So far I like it a lot however, due to my job I need to run some things in XP or Vista. Instead of "polluting" my new Macbook Air with a partition with XP I thought it would be neat to run XP from a USB stick. They are cheap and quite large nowadays but I really have no clue if it is doable technically. It might be too slow or there might be other issues that I don't know of.
Can anyone shed some light or point in the right direction.
All help will be highly appreciated.
A

I would guess that performance wouldn't be so good trying to run XP from an external hard drive, but I haven't tried it nor do I know if it is possible. I'm in the same boat with needing to run some XP programs.
I've been using VMware Fusion and it works well. However, the MBA runs hot and battery life suffers when just running VMware without much going on in the XP machine. You can probably put the XP VM on a usb key and have VMware run it from there. As for the software running in a VM rather than native, the programs run and the speed is tolerable but I don't mistake it for my ThinkPad. Depending on how much resources your software needs, the MBA may not be a good fit.
Regards-Michael G.

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