USB Drives Rock

USB drives are getting more and more popular every day. The most common are
1. "thumb drive", "flash drive", "pocket disk" - those nifty pinky-sized drives that you carry around.
2. dedicated, portable CD-ROM or DVD/CD
3. dedicated, portable hard drive
4. my favorite hybrid: a $25 IDE case containing either a hard drive or a burner (CD/DVD)
5. some people use the flash memory in their digital cameras (!) Hey, it works.

In any case they are so handy as a Nike-net (foot-powered network). You download files from one computer onto the USB drive; you upload the files from the USB drive to another computer. Several of my clients use the USB drive as a backup device for critical files (accounting data is a favorite). Our running joke that if there's a fire, grab the USB disk and get outside. Once the disk is safe, go back to help your spouse and kids.

The problem is that Windows sometimes struggles with displaying the USB drive & its contents in Explorer. Remeber: we're talking about Microsoft and Windows.
- Windows should recognize the USB drive and assign an unused drive letter to it.
- Sometimes the USB drive will grab an existing drive letter and use for its own drive letter Thus hiding the contents of the existing drive.
- Sometimes Windows insists on using an existing drive letter which is in use, and the refuses to display the intruding USB drive.

Here's how I make it work correctly 100% of the time.
- decide which drive letter you want to permanently assign to the USB drive
- with the USB drive installed recognized by the system,
- right click on My Computer
- left click on Manage
- left click on Disk Management
- in the list of drives, right click on the USB drive
- left click on Change Drive Letter....
- left click on Add
- assign the drive letter you want the USB drive to use
- click OK
Back out of the applet gracefully.

Now, whether or not the USB drive is installed, the driver letter you chose is reserved for the USB drive.

How To Do a Thorough Windows System Cleanup

System cleanup:

Take the whole system into your garage or backyard. Use your leaf blower to blow high velocity air thru the front vents out thru the power supply fan. This removes the dust and air borne contaminates and will reduce any dirty cache buffers to a minimum. The power supply fan should turn freely as the air passes from the front vents and out the back of the power supply. Listen for the sound of a clean running power supply fan. It should sound more like a penguins screaming instead of cards flapping on bicycle spokes.

Next take the whole system to a do-it-yourself car wash. Use cold water only and no soap or wax. The solid-state devices on the motherboard are made of a thin film of electrons. Soap will add to the resistance of the thin film that already exists thus causing the system to need a bath of film remover. Film removal is a process that should be left to professionals, because too much film removal will decrease the internal resistance and make the whole system more vulnerable to bugs and viruses.

Wax is also harmful to the internal components because it makes them pass the air from the fan over themselves too quickly. The fast moving air will cool the min-coil inductors to the point of electron freeze. Naturally, this will cause your system to slow down, hang or freeze.

Once you see the cold water run clear out of the power supply and vents you need to take it home and put it in the oven at the time and temperature listed in the chart.

Operating System	Oven Temp	Duration
Windows 3.x	16°	8hours
Windows 95	32°	4 hours
Half-baked O/S Windows 98/ME	32°	16 hours Same as above but takes twice as long.
Windows 2000/Xp	64°	15 minutes

Your time may vary. Reassemble system but leave power cord disconnected for 2 minutes to allow the bit bucket to empty and the DNS cache to flush. Don’t leave it disconnected more than 5 minutes if you have drive pools.

The above was 100% tongue-in-cheek.

Speed-up Start-up?

At start-up time, Windows like to load lots of stuff into memory. The logic is that this process makes lots of tools and services available immediately. For instance, every font installed on your computer is loaded into memory during voodoo time when you can't tell what's going on: the screen is black, or all you see is the Windows logo..... That's not necesarily a bad thing. For instance, if you're using a program that can use many fonts (a Word Processor??), you want all the fonts available to peruse instantly.

OK, so having lots of fonts is a two-edged sword. I speeded my computer's startup by eliminating 350 fonts that I downloaded, but never use. That font where all the letters look as if they were built from beer cans? Gone. The one that features a butt-ugly script? Toast. The font that looks like a pre-teen girl mangled a normal font by adding curlies and hearts to every character? Hasta la vista, Baby.

I did keep the Coca-Cola script. And the ASL signing. And Braille. And the ransom note font; you never know when you might need to type out a ransom note.

You can do the same with unneeded services. But that's for another day, another tip.

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Daddy, That Software Hurt My Feelings

"UCLA researchers have discovered that computer users can be just as traumatized by rude computers as by rude humans. I understand that after hearing the news, thousands of Windows users began preparing a class action suit against Microsoft for two decades of neglect and abuse."
-- By Robert X. Cringely® InfoWorld: February 18, 2005