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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week –
8/16/2006 |
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Flash drives continue excite the
pc industry more than flash dance excited moviegoers .... Probably
the most exciting technology to emerge in the pc world these past few years
have been USB Flash Drive storage devices. For the
past several years one of the best changes in computer architecture is
what’s known as the USB or universal serial bus ports. The older
generation of pc’s used two types of ports – or portals- to communicate with devices like
printers – in which data transmitted in either
single or parallel streams
– slowly. Today most computer devices, printers,
mice, and particularly scanners and cameras – now
connect via the USB ports on your new computer. USB ports are already in their 2nd
generation, with many machines that came with Windows 98 on them having USB
1.0 ports, and computers with Windows XP having the new 2.0 ports, and
usually these ports now are on the front of your computer, for easy access. The new
technology in file transfer and backup is what as known as USB flash drives,
tiny little memory plug-in drives
about the size of a stick of gum that plug right into one of your USB
ports, and you use windows
explorer to copy files to it at high speed. Then you just pop it out of your
computer, plug it into another
computer and copy files from the flash drive to the other computer. Or you
give it to someone to use on their home computer, or maybe you mail or ship
it to someone. I bought
a SanDisk 256
Meg flash drive at Costco 2 years ago for $ 39.95. You plug it into any pc
using Windows, XP, ME, or 2000, and you don’t need any drivers –
it’s straight plug and play. The company does provide a driver for
windows 98 machines. It also can be used on Apple Macs. Today you can get a
one gig flashdrive for the same
price $ 39.95 , and the storage capacity now goes up to 4 gigs. I used to
always carry a portable computer with me in my daily work – now
I’ve lightened up by several pounds and just carry a couple flash drives
. You see, the purpose of my carrying a portable was so I could access
programs that I needed. It was either carry a portable, which weighed several
pounds, or carry dozens of floppy disks. Now everything I need fits on a 1
Gig Flashdrive. There’s
time and cost
savings in using Flash drives to back up also. They’re rewritable, so
you can keep erasing the data that’s on them, and use them over again. They’re
also much faster than burning a cd to backup data, because everything goes at
flash memory speed, not the much slower speed of having to burn a cd. You can
also use flash drives for copying and transporting MP3 files, pictures,
mpegs, anything that’s on your computer you can put on a flash drive. .
Flash
drives are a great, cheap and simple technology you should be using today. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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