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Hewie's Views and Reviews Welcome to this issue of Hewie's Views & Reviews. Be sure to visit Hewie's Favorites at http://www.hewie.net/ . ++++ Ten Years ++++ Ten Years In December 1995, Hewie's Favorites went live on the Internet. We are 10 Years old. For those of you who don't go back that far with us, we grew out of the BBS (Bulletin Board System) world that existed before the Internet came on the scene. Users connected to my computers via standard phone lines to access messages left by other users and download the many freeware and shareware files that I had available. When the FABulous BBS signed off, I had 16 CDROM drives with disks filled with downloads and a satellite dish to download the latest shareware. ++++ Thumbs Up Many of you own the USB Flash drives, also known as key, thumb, or jump drives. These drives are getting larger and getting cheaper. The 512 MB and 1 GB drives are cheap enough for even the casual user to own one to move files from one computer to another. In the past we used the 1.44 MB floppy disk to do the same tasks. Now we can carry 500 to 1000 floppies in the space of a car key. In a recent newsletter from http://www.theinfobox.com I discovered that the author had put together a menu and many portable freeware programs that can be copied to a flash drive and run without installing them. There are some great utilities, productivity programs, security programs, and even some games. I demonstrated many of the included programs to my local computer group and many had use by the members. Some of the utilities are great to just plug in the drive to find system information. Many of us help our relatives and friends that when they have problems. We can plug in the drive to discover what the system components before we start diagnosing. When we travel and have to work on someone else's computer, we can use the included programs, save word files, spreadsheets, or even a PowerPoint presentation on the thumb drive to use later, without installing or using unfamiliar programs. I can see so many uses. ++++ Is there an end? A question came up while reading the http://www.theinfobox.com newsletter about the life of thumb drives. The descriptions of a couple of the programs referenced the fact that they were tuned to lengthen the life of a flash drive. I contacted Patrick Anderson from theinfobox. He sent me to an article at http://www.lawtechguru.com which states that there is a limit to number of "writes" that you can do with a flash drive. The number that is accepted is 100,000. That's a lot of writes, but is a limit. I have contacted a few of the flash drive manufacturers for their info on the finite number of writes for their drives, but haven't heard back from them. ++++ Security Issue I have a read a lot of articles about security issues of allowing users to plug in flash drives at work or school. I would like to hear from any of my readers as to your experiences for rules of usage of flash drives and how it is handled. Please let me know. I will pass on my findings to all of you. ++++ New additions to Hewie's Favorites MailNation Solutions Aid4Mail paper cd case Candy Calculator Herbal supplements Straight Dope Archive How To Stop Junk Faxes GreenSloth.com WindowsXP Tips Museum of online museums MyProgs Using a MySQL database with PHP Tutorials for Web Developers SendSpace Free Classic AudioBooks WebProWire FusionUser Florida Travel Information Symantec Security Response Spyware Warrior Rogue or Suspect Spyware Warrior |
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