Thumb drive, pen drive, flash drive — call it what you will, but beyond doubt, the diminutive device has come a long way from being an expensive alternative to floppy disks. Today, they’re much more than NAND-type flash memory encased in a plastic shell with a USB (universal serial bus) interface, they’re part of our lives, the modern day file folder, holding inside them our data (and our livelihood)!
Did you know then that your thumb drive can do much more than ferry data from Point A to Point B? Here’s our pick of the top five things (you probably didn’t know) your thumb drive can do:
Portable applications: Can’t install Firefox at work? Do you pine for your programmes, set up your own way, everywhere you go? Software gurus have reworked versions of assorted applications so that they run directly off your thumb drive. Among my favourites — portable editions of the Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mail programme, and OpenOffice suite. Preferences, data files, an d the like all stay on the portable device, so you don’t leave any traces of your browsing history or passwords on the host computer. A one-stop shop for portable applications is at Portable Applications (http://portableapps.com/), which includes a freeware portable application launcher that offers a ton of portable applications, ranging from Office software to web browsers, even music players. This site also offers the Portable Apps Suite, which includes a web browser, e-mail client, web editor, office suite, word processor, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client and FTP client and weighs in at a mere 117 megabytes (44MB for the Lite version).
Of course, armed with the right software, you can be the neighbourhood Dr Fix-It too — load up the AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic (http://www.free-av.com/) and rid the locality of viruses of the electronic kind. It’s free, runs off a thumb drive, and can be loaded on the PC after it’s cleaned, too.
Carry Data Securely: If thumb drives are easy to carry, they’re also easy to misplace. Built-in tools on drives like the Lexar JumpDrive Secure II drives and the Kingston DataTraveler Elite drives let you protect your files with 256-bit AES encryption. In fact, you can even create a partition on the drive that encrypts any file dropped into it and that appears onscreen under a different drive letter. Of course, if security is really that important to you, pick up a thumb drive with a built-in fingerprint scanner, which will secure your data until you swipe the appropriate finger against it.
some softwares are also available to do the job like usb flash security. Its 30 day trial software. But its good..
Experiment with Linux: Most engineering students want to tinker with the popular open-source operating system, but many stay away for fear of modifying their hard drives. An easy option is to download Damn Small Linux, which installs the basic operating system and a bevy of productivity applications — for free of course, in as little as 256MB — that’s the smallest flash drive I’ve got, and it’s been with me for the past seven years!
Carry Windows with you: If you’re paranoid (or ultra-finicky), you can even carry an entire installation of Windows with you. Yes, Windows! It takes a little while to set up, but it’s mostly just moving files around, and you need the original Windows XP install CD, and easy to follow instructions are available at http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176. Of course, your computer must have the ability to boot from USB, which is usually not a problem if you’ve bought it within the past three to four years.
Speed up Windows Vista: If you’ve got a spare USB drive laying around with some free space, you could use it to make Windows Vista work a little bit faster. Using a little-known feature called ReadyBoost, a spare USB 2.0 thumb drive with enough space can speed up the OS performance. Just plug in your drive and choose “Speed up my system” from the AutoPlay menu to enable ReadyBoost, which uses some fancy disk-caching to make Windows a bit snappier. Just keep in mind that for the drive to be ReadyBoost ready, it needs to be over 256MB, have an access time faster than 1ms, be capable of 2.5 MB/s reads and 1.75 MB/s writes — all the stuff you can find on the thumb drive manual.
Automatic back-ups: Yes, we promised five tips, but one more (for free) couldn’t hurt in these times, could it? Make your drive do more as well — if you use your USB thumb drive as a back-up device to hold your important documents, why not make the process easier? Install Allway Sync(http:// allwaysync.com/) or Microsoft SyncToy (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx). Both can let you sync files on your computer with your USB pen drive with ease. You don’t have to do manual copy and paste files — just insert, click and you’re done!
Its better to purchase pen drives from online store (like flipkart and others) as they are cheaper and pay after its delivered to your home provided if you live in some big city.
thus both your time and money can be saved.
I prefer transcend pen drives as they have better read and write speeds.
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