USB Flash Drive Tricks

Transporting and transferring your files are the common things you do with your thumb drive. But there are other ways to maximize the functionality and portability of your USB flash drive. Below are some tips and tricks that you can apply on your flash drive.

1. Run portable applications. Aside from using as data storage, you can install and run some applications on your USB. In this way, you can use your most frequently used programs wherever you go, provided that there’s an available computer. There are numerous portable applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird IM clients, OpenOffice and even anti-virus softwares.

2. Boot a separate operating system. If you want to have your own portable virtual computer system, you may want to try to boot the entire operating system from your thumb drive. You can install a standalone Windows or Linux operating system      from your mini hard disk, but the process is somewhat different from installing an OS in a PC. For the exact way to do this, there are available resources on the Internet regarding this trick.

3. Encrypt your sensitive data. There are many free applications on the World Wide Web that can encrypt your private data inside your thumb drive. TrueCrypt is an example of it. Keep in mind that you must have administrative privilege to access the encrypted data inside the USB.

4. Create a password reset manager. In Windows Vista, you can now create the password reset disk in your USB drive instead of using a floppy drive. This method makes it easy for you to change your user account password if you forgot it.

5. Make a portable MP3 player. If you love listening to songs but there’s no mp3 player in your office’s computer, you can create one. In addition to Windows Media Player, there are also portable media player that you can install in your flashdrive.