Cool Technology - Cruzer Mini USB Flash Drive

Although USB Flash drives have been around for awhile, I finally purchased one a couple of weeks ago. I now consider these small devices, which are about the size of my thumb and hold between 128MB and 1024MB of data, to be about the greatest thing since the breech loading rifle. What prompted me to purchase one was the fact that my new laptop didn't come with a diskette drive, but only a DVD/CD drive. Therefore, if I had any data to transfer between PCs, I either had to copy it via the 'net, email it to myself or burn it to a CD. Even on devices that I use that have diskette drives, they're only limited to 1.44MB, which generally isn't enough for me—and they're so prone to failure as well. Also, all of the desktops and laptops that I use, both at work and at home, have a number of available USB dirves - which made a USB Flash Drive perfect for my needs.

After doing a little—but certainly not a lot of—research, I decided on the SanDisk 256 Cruzer Mini USB Flash Drive, which lists at $54.99 (although you should be able to easily find it for under $40.00).The reason that I decided on this brand, other than the fact that its price was roughly the same of other products of the same capacity, is that it's compatible with both USB 1.1 (which many somewhat older PCs still have) and USB 2.0 (which is the new standard). Even though I considered buying the 512MB or 1GB version, I just didn't think I'd ever need that much capacity—and so far I haven't.

Another nice feature is the fact that this device doesn't need any drivers. You simply insert it into an available USB drive and it automatically gets recognized as the next available drive letter. This takes about 30-60 seconds the first time you do it, but after that it's pretty much instantaneous. So far I've installed my SanDisk 256 Cruzer Mini in three different PCs (e.g. Dell desktop, Dell laptop and IBM laptop) and it has worked great everytime.

Enjoy...

Microsoft's War on Bugs

In Wired Magazine's interview with Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft’s security program manager, he admits to using Mozilla Firefox. Just in case there are still some Windows users out there who haven't gotten the word about all the security holes in IE, you know now...so switch to FireFox.

Enjoy...