usb drives

This is my first day using this product, so far so good. It does what the product description says it should do. However, the photograph above is of a product that may exist out there, but not of the product I have, even though it certainly IS a PNY 512 Mb USB portable drive. The shape/design is a little different, but more importantly:

1. No write/delete protection switch. If you look at the photo above and expect it to have the same switch that prevents deletion, which is present on all the other models of lower capacity by PNY - you won't find it.

2. The lanyard on all the other similar PNY products is attached to the body of the stick, whereas on mine the lanyard attaches only to the cap. There's the potential danger that the stick may drop out of its own weight (though the cap attaches to it quite securely). If you're worried about this, carry it in your shirt pocket and use the pretty lanyard for something else.

3. The ton of information that comes on a minidisk for this product is useless, they all talk about the other models that look like the photo above. For one thing, there's a green led and a yellow led, and I'm left to guess that the difference is that one lights up for USB 1.1 connections and the other for USB 2.0 connections, or that one lights up for Windows 2000 and the other for WinXP - who knows. Worse, there is NOBODY TO TALK TO. I can't find a link on the PNY site to communicate with their tech support, you'll find lots of FAQs but no one to talk to if you have questions.

4. What drive letter is assigned to it when you use it on Windows systems - a total mystery. It comes up as D on one system and E on another - I suspect it finds the first available letter above C and uses that. I did assign it a specific letter on one system, but it still came up as another letter on a different machine, and I won't know until I'm back at the first system if that means I need to start re-assigning drive letters every time I use it on a different system.

If it turns out that it does find the first available letter, that's a vast improvement on previous versions, but it would be nice to have that documented somewhere.

Other than that, it works as advertized, I'm happily transferring files back and forth.

Wouldn't you know it, as soon as I make the point about the difference between the product and the photo above, Amazon was kind enough to update the photo. Just so there are no doubts, as of this writing, what you see is what you get.