New Use on Your Thumb

Power on your thumb.

by Irene Tham

FIRE up your desktop directly from your USB drive when you are at a terminal in an Internet cafe and want the familiar look and feel of your PC at home.

Applications that can run directly off the USB drive include the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suite, the Gaim instant messenger and the Thunderbird e-mail client.

Your travel-with-you gizmo can encrypt files on the fly too. The Kingston DataTraveler Elite, for instance, secures files with 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption. Just drag and drop the file into the portable drive and voila, the work is saved - and safe.

SanDisk's newly launched Ultra Backup USB Flash Drive, boosting capacities of up to 64GB for US$199.99 (S$292), is another safe travel-mate. The drive can be password protected for added safety.

However, these devices are not cheap. It is not just the hardware you are paying for, but the software as well.

One of the biggest uses of the modest USB drive is reviving your spyware-infected PC.

Load one of these gizmos with a bunch of emergency security tools and you are ready to go. This is especially useful if your PC is not connected to the Internet and has no access to software downloads.

A budget emergency security toolkit includes free anti-virus program Avira AntiVir Personal, which runs directly from your USB drive, and spyware scanning program Ad-Aware Free. The latter cannot run from the USB drive but the installer file will get going quickly on a PC.

A wiper program that runs from the USB drive will also come in handy if your PC hard disk cannot be cleaned up and needs to be overwritten to protect sensitive data. Heidi Computers' free Eraser program will do the job just fine.

Instead of using USB drives only with the PC or laptop, they can be slotted into some DVD players. So you play movies directly off them without having to copy the movies onto a blank DVD.

USB drives are hardy devices. They have been thrown into washing machines and dunked in coffee by mistake and reportedly emerged unscathed.

Still, depending on how much you paid for them, you may want to keep them dry and free from abuse.

Digital Life