[Web4lib] U3 Thumb Drives

[Tom Keays]

This thread is very timely, since I encountered my first U3 device
helping a patron this week. I might not have figured out what was
going on, but remembering what I heard here, it only took a moment to
show the patron that it was showing up as two separate drives -- D and
E -- on our public workstations.

These workstations are locked down so you can not launch programs off
flash drives. The D partition of the U3 was completely inaccessible
but the E drive worked as a normal USB storage device. I am not sure
that the patron knew it wasn't a regular USB drive, but once he
understood which drive letter to save files to, he was happy.

On 11/24/06, Darryl Friesen <Darryl.Friesen at usask.ca> wrote:
> They really are awesome devices, for staff anyway.  I have Thunderbird,
> Firefox, Trillian and PuTTY all installed on my U3 device.

You don't actually need a U3 to do this: I run Firefox Portable 2.0
with a bunch of extensions such as Zotero and GTDGmail as well as
several Greasemonkey scripts including COinS off my plain vanilla
Lexar Jumpdrive. I had Portable Trillian on it too, but deleted it
recently for lack of use and to recover some storage space.

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable
http://www.trilliananywhere.com/

The fact that the U3 software can't be reinstalled in the event of a
problem worries me a little bit, but they don't seem to be priced much
differently than regular USB drives. I might buy one just to
understand them a little better.

-- 
Tom