Short answer: No. Not on the consumer side, anyway. Consumer products for the USB 3.0 specification will appear in 2010 which is not all that far away. How to recognize USB 3.0 when it’s available? Look for the "SuperSpeed" and "SS" logos, like these:  What new features will be in USB 3.0? SuperSpeed as shown above. It gives a...

USB sticks are hitting rock bottom prices these days. A 16GB stick is now under $30. And 8GB sizes are easily available for under $15. However this is nowhere near as cost effective as burning DVDs. In fact it’s not even close. The 16GB stick is $30. Put into cost per gigabyte, each gig costs $1.88. A 100-pack spindle of Maxell (a mid-grade brand) 16x...

Yes, this is a retro article, but with a modern twist. The Commodore 64 is to date the best-selling computer of all time and hasn’t been topped. An all too common item to be seen next to the C64 was the 1541 floppy disk drive. This actually was in fact more than just a disk drive. It was a computer because it did contain a microprocessor (this one, in...

Years ago when I first started examining if you could in fact run an entire OS off a single USB stick (meaning not external hard drive), you could with “biz card” sized Linux distributions such as Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux. These distros are still available today and still actively developed. The reason people chose these over full-sized...

When formatting a USB stick in Windows (something many of us do from time to time), in XP you usually only have two file system options, FAT or FAT32. "FAT", by the way, means "File Allocation Table". If you were wondering which to pick, the answer is FAT32 because it overcomes certain limitations of FAT. However if you have a USB stick...

Unless you use your dial-up modem for faxing or internet you probably don’t have much use for it. However there are some good software titles to make it useful again. PhoneTray is a product (and yes there’s a free version on that site) that will show Caller ID and also has the ability to "zap" telemarketer calls as well. Telemarketing...

Sign of the times: I go into Walgreen’s the other day to pick up a bag of cashews (they’re quite tasty), and in the photo center I spot 4GB USB sticks for $16. Yes, I know you can pick up these things for cheaper elsewhere, but the fact a business primarily known as a pharmacy carries these things is what got my attention. The brand Walgreen’s...

In the laptop world, everybody is going smaller into "netbook" territory. Linux, of course, was more than ready for it because it already had super-small-footprint distributions ready to rock. Some distributions are available for purchase direct-on-stick such as the Linutop shown right. Linutop is also specifically designed for the Intel Atom-based...

In previous articles and videos I’ve discussed how to get a "Live" mode (i.e. as if your computer were booting from CD) of Linux on a USB stick. Some people think this is cool but would rather have a full CD-sized distribution installation instead. And when I said "CD-sized" I’m referring to distributions that take up the entire...

This is a follow-up article to this one showing how simple it is to use Unetbootin to install a Linux distribution to your USB stick. Bear in mind that Unetbootin has the choice of many different distros to choose from. Even if you have only have an older 128MB stick, you still could use Damn Small Linux on it! See video below for...

What exactly is a “persistent” install? With a normal Live-CD boot of Ubuntu, you can’t save your session settings on exit of the OS. And if you boot off USB stick from a transferred CD image (such as one created using the Unetbootin utility), that won’t save your settings either because the OS is still in Live mode on boot. A persistent...

There are more than a few people out there who would find it quite handy to be able to run Windows XP off a USB stick (or hard drive in a caddy). I was also interested to know if this was possible to do. The Big Question: Is it possible? Answer: Yes. However it is a humongous pain in the butt to get working. The best write-up I found on how to get XP running...

If one were to ask me what I believe are most innovate computer inventions, USB is definitely one of them. The reason is because USB is the Swiss Army knife in the computer world. It can basically do just about anything. USB can transfer data, audio, video, access storage (i.e. flash memory), access power, be used for wired or wireless networking and so on. In...

Over the weekend I was at the Wal-Mart picking up a few things and noticed over in the electronics dept. they had 2GB Sandisk USB sticks on sale. $12.88 a piece. Cheap enough as far as I’m concerned so I bought one. I had 2 purposes for buying the stick.It’s better than the 512MB I have (one can never have too much space). I wanted to try out a...

Sick of burning CDs of Linux distributions every time you want to try out a new one? Don’t worry, you can reuse your USB stick as many times as you like and burn bootable ISOs to it. Is there an easy way to do this? Yes. It’s actually pretty easy. But before I tell you how there’s a small list of things you need to do first:You need a USB...

One problem I run into on systems which have USB devices plugged into them when resuming from [S3] standby is an error message which reads: Power Surge on Hub Port: A USB Device has exceeded the power limits of its hub port. This message is followed by a dialog box which forces you to reset the USB device’s connection. Of course, this can get somewhat...

The sound card on your desktop computer has 1/8th-inch ports on the rear to accept other types of audio input (blue for line in, pink for mic in). If you have a custom-build computer you may have these ports also routed to the front as well. If you record audio at all with these ports, be it via a microphone built-in to a headset or having a mixing board fed a...

The best way to record live audio (for those of us without huge budgets) on a computer is via USB. It’s a much "cleaner" sound compared to using the "Mic" or "Line in" on your sound card. Bear in mind when referring to USB on computers you don’t have to worry about data transfer, so even if a device is only 1.1...

Puppy Linux is a small (by design) Linux distribution that easily fits on a USB stick. If your computer has the ability to boot from a USB stick (which many do), this can benefit you in a number of ways. 1. If your hard drive fails, you’ve still got a working computer. Obviously none of us ever want this to happen, but in the event that it does, you can...

If you’ve been using computers a long while you probably have an old printer lying around somewhere. And it’s most likely true the only reason you don’t use it is either because:It’s too big to fit on the desk. It uses an insanely thick cable with a Centronics connector to connect to your computer. Your computer (especially if a laptop)...