James is the Computer Guy in our office and he's a full-fledged geek. He says so himself. Yep, computers are his world. They're our world too, but on a much smaller scale. We've convinced him to share some of his knowledge, give us some suggestions, and pointers about thumb drives.
This will be a "three-parter" article. Today we're going to start to learn about thumb drives! You may learn something new today!
Welcome, James!
Thumb drives are not all that exciting. You most likely have one or more and use them to copy files between computers. If you don’t have one and are too cheap to buy one, go to your local hotel/convention center and there’s usually a booth giving them away. The main purpose of this article is to cover what you can do with a thumb drive besides copying files to take with you – although I’ll go over what files you put on it later. That being said, once you have your thumb drive, EVERYTHING I’m going to go over is free.
Let’s start with portability. You have your thumb drive to move files, but what if you could take your operating system with you? DSL (D*** Small Linux) is a complete operating system which can run off a thumb drive. There are two ways you can go from here.
One is that you boot your computer to the USB drive (your thumb drive in this case), and once booted, you have access to all your programs, files, email, etc. Any computer that can boot to a USB drive (most do nowadays) can run your operating system. The benefit is that you take what you think of as your computer – everywhere you go – home computer, office computer, laptop or an in-law’s home while you’re on vacation. From a technical standpoint, this option has its benefits. If your computer gets a virus, malware, or what not, you can boot with the thumb drive and deal with whatever problem you’re having without ever loading Windows onto your computer.
The second path, with a portable operating system, is more user-friendly. Instead of booting your computer with your thumb drive, you run it inside of Windows just like any other application. Run your thumb drive’s operating system application and you get a window with your desktop inside it that you can minimize and do everything you would expect with any other application.
Let me say that DSL, which I mentioned above, is just one route to go. There are other flavors of Linux –and some people even have Windows on theirs. I know Linux can be intimidating for someone with no experience with it, but to put it on a thumb drive is not much harder than copying the files.
Once you have it running, the same basic principals apply. Double click an icon on the desktop and it opens, click the “X” in the corner and it closes, click “File” then “Save” and it’ll do the same thing you’re used to when you perform this action in Windows.
All right – there’s a good chance you just don’t care enough to carry around a portable operating system. I’m a full-fledged geek, and I have an operating system on my thumb drive. But, with multiple laptops, an iPhone and a Blackberry, I’m pretty set on mobility as is – so I don’t use it much. If I only had a home computer and a work computer – it might be different.
James
Watch for more geeky stuff next week in Part 2
