Gnomie Scott writes:
Hey Chris, just wanted to share my own personal views on the top 5 uses of a USB pen drive.
- As a small backup solution. It’s now a widely known fact that on most modern computers, you can install Windows XP (or if your pen drive is large enough, Vista), to a USB pen drive. So if for any reason (that is not hardware related) you can’t boot to Windows, you can still boot to an installation of Windows, plug in an external hard drive and pull off any information from the hard drive before formatting.
- For Windows ready boost. In Windows Vista, ready boost allows you to allocate a pen drive as RAM. Now I’ve not tried this yet, and I can’t see it increasing speeds massively, however, a pen drive can be used as what me and the guys at work call ‘poor man’s RAM.’
- Portable apps. If you head on over here you will find a utility that allows you to put a whole load of programs on your pen drive and use them portably — the most convenient of which seems to be Mozilla Thunderbird. The idea that I can synchronize all my contacts and details from my main computer and take them with me is worth it on its own regardless of all the other great applications you can have on the move using portable apps.
- Moving files from one PC to another. Plain and simple, if you’re not a power user, or know nothing about networking, a flash drive could be the way to go in order to move files from one PC to the next. This will of course be limited to the size of the pen drive, but with sizes higher than 16 GB now available, that will soon be far less of an issue.
- Booting to Linux. If you’re like many of the Vista angry users and want to find out more about Linux, then this could be the way to go. Installing a Linux distro to a pen drive will allow for the use of the hard drive and all the files on it. Sure you could use a live CD, but then you would lose the ability to use that optical drive within the Linux environment. This is particularly useful for those running on laptops or PCs with only one optical drive.