Boot from USB - Anyone with experience?

I'm going to reformat computer, but I'm limited in possibilities to do that:

As I lack DVDs/CDs at the current moment, I'm not able to boot from those. That leaves me with my USB memory stick. I'd consider the task to be quite easy: unpack the data from an .iso-file to the USB memory stick.

Obviously it couldn't be that easy, says my computer. Thus I just googled different terms coming up with a ton of different solutions, all which seems to be completely outdated and horribly long. However, I've tried some, made my USB stick to a Floppy Disk (my computer looked at my usb-stick as a floppy disk ), I've converted to formats not really possible to format to. I'm only able to format to FAT32 from what Windows tells me, but magically I've made the USB stick into NTFS, and right now, it's currently a FAT-formatted.

Disregard the upper information really, and read this:
The USB stick I have is a TwinMOS Mobile Disk M9, 4GB.
My motherboard/bios allow starting up from an USB-device

So, the question: Has anyone ever practically made a bootable USB which worked? What did you do?

Thanks for the support. If no reply I'll make a guide myself when I find out. If I do, that is.

The newer Asus motherboards allow you to emulate removable disks as either floppy, CD/DVD or hard drive.

If your motherboard supports booting from an usb drive, you can have an operating system on it and boot into that.

There is no otherwise for you to emulate your flash drive as CD/DVD.

Well, my motherboard supports booting from usb drives. However, it seems like my USB-drive hung up and such, so I gave up and found some DVDs at my dad's.

Though this may not work in practice, it should then be possible to actually have your OS and programs on a flash drive, (say 64 GB), and boot from that one, yes? Though reading and writing-speed may be quite low...