usb drives

I just purchased this product at Office Depot at a check out lane. This thing is a screaming eagle. It transfers files effortlessly and immediately. You can stick it in your pocket, wallet, or anywhere else you want to put it. Just plug it into your USB port and away you go. Like the other reviewer said, it's no bigger than a pack of gum and it's lightning fast.

I was using an older 128 MB flash drive as the file system for e-mail on two older laptop computers. This allowed me to keep my mail synchronized on my primary home system and the one I take on travel. The problem was that I outgrew the 128 MB, and since both of my systems were older circa 2001 laptops that used USB 1.1 and ran under Windows 98 SE none of the gigabyte flash drives would work with it - all of the others required either USB 2.0 and/or Windows ME or 2000.

This drive, however, is backwards compatible with the older USB 1.1 interface, and a Windows 98 SE driver is available for download from the manufacturer's site.

Download and installation of the new driver went perfectly. It was literally done in a few mouse clicks. I plugged the drive into each machine and it was immediately recognized by both my Sony and IBM laptops. I also tried this on a Windows 2000 system and it was immediately recognized and assigned as a disk drive without drivers.

Not only does this device work as advertised with no problems, but it also leaves room for a second USB device on laptops that have adjacent ports (my Sony is configured like this). My old flash drive required me to use an USB extension cable in order to have room to plug in my mouse, so the form factor is yet another feature I like about this particular model.

One final feaure I very much like - you can encrypt files on this device, and since I am using it as an email file system the privacy and protection this affords me is important.

Highly recommended if you want a high-capacity flash drive that will work on older Windows 98 SE systems, or just a reliable and easy-to-install flash drive for any system. It will not work on Windows 95 and below systems (none of the flash drives of which I am aware will).