With spring just around the corner it’s a great time to get some digital gear for summer. Nothing would fit that ticket better then a USB SurfDrive. Obviously you couldn’t hang-ten with this board, unless you where a USB Star Wars Pez but a great Easter basket stuffer for your little one. USB SurfDrives are available in sizes from 256MB to 1GB with free shipping. Who said USB novelty items are worthless?
Softland jumps onto the U3 momentum and offers a portable backup solution, Back Up 4 All. One feature which caught my eye, is the ability to preconfigure a UFD to auto-backup upon plugin to a host computer.
BackUp4All can also back up locked files and perform full, partial or mirror backups. Softland mentions you can also set filters and review which files changed between the current back and the previous.
If you are like the other 90% of computer users, backing up once a month will do the trick, but if you’re a U3 junkie or simply want to be better prepaired, grab Back Up 4 All.
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OCZ Technology ups the ante for UFDs with their Rally 2 with Firewire connectivity. Although USB is king for connectivity it never hurts to have options, especially when USB ports disappear so quickly with keyboards, speakers and now monitors.
The Rally 2 flash drive comes with two Firewire version, a small 4pin version and larger 6 pin version. As Dave White from Mobile Magazine admits, the Rally 2 could be the answer to what could be a common problem – lack of USB ports.
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Samsung announced a new 19-inch LCD monitor called, the SyncMaster 940UX, which can be connected to a PC using only a USB port. I’ve been saying this for years, but a move like this from Samsung once again proves my point…USB is king of plug-n-play solutions.
The SyncMaster approach of USB connectivity for monitors eliminates the need for a second graphics card and although it never took a masters degree in engineering
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Doing music releases on a flash drive are slowly becoming more popular. Now available are The Fratellis on flash.
The 256MB flash drive includes the single Baby Fratelli (listen now), the video which goes along with it, a web link and “competition,” whatever that is. I would say The Fratellis have a touch of Penny Wise, Wild Flower and my buddies band Imperial X.
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UPDATE: The MagicJack phone jack received Product of the Year in 2007. After the purchase of the MagicJack USB dongle (about $40) you pay a one time fee of $19.95 per year for unlimited calling. Not $19.95 per month BUT $19.95 per year. This will reduce your phone bill to just $20 a year! The MagicJack phone is available at Amazon.
Review: GetUSB.info reviews MagicJack, the Magic Phone Jack.
MagicJack is a convenient USB dongle with phone jack attached to it. By connecting your regular phone to the MagicJack phone port, you can now make free calls anywhere within the US for free. If traveling in Canada, Mexico, UK, China, Italy and Israel then you can call home (USA) for free.
MagicJack is a VoIP service which doesn’t have phone charges but rather an upfront cost for the USB dongle. No pricing yet, but it does provide not only free calling using your regular phone, but includes
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So here’s a poor mans USB hack to secure your network from unscrupulous characters downloading company secrets via USB.
In Windows XP SP2 and Vista you can disable writing to USB devices altogether by implementing a simple registry hack.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\
Control\StorageDevicePolicies] “WriteProtectâ€=dword:00000001
**Note: I inserted a break after …Set\< br>Control… to fit into post page.
Once done, reboot and you’re set. Make sure others don’t have Administrative rights, otherwise they could easily set things back. Here is the Vista error message upon copy attempt:
There is an auto executable download available to disable writing to USB drives without searching for the registry area yourself. If interested in this USB hack, then jump over to How-To-Geek and snag it.
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One year ago, almost to the day, IOCell introduced the self proclaimed “World’s largest capacity flash drive” at the CeBIT 2006 show. Today, you can find 16GB flash drives from Transcend, US Modular and Pretec, so why is the Buffalo 16GB announcement of interest? Well, it uses Silicon HDD Technology.
Silicon hard drives are different then normal hard drives in that no magnetic discs are present, rather the data is stored in silicon memory. How the silicon (HDD) hard drive works is by
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Often those USB novelty gadgets are quite lame, but put a little music to it and become very funny. Take, for example, the USB poll dancer.
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Yesterday GetUSB.info reported on Kingston giving U3 the axe and their decision to stop selling the portable application bundled into Kingston UFDs.
Interestingly enough, part of that announcement indicated sales for U3 devices are lack-luster and demand for U3 drives aren’t high enough to offset the royalty fee associated with platform.
However, as the story broke, GetUSB.info just finished their latest USB Poll on “Do You Own a Flash Drive With U3 Software?” The results concluded that 64% of GetUSB.info readers have U3 drives, where as the balance do not. Seems to us, there are some mixed numbers.
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Kingston Technology released a statement yesterday giving U3 the axe for pre-installation on USB flash drives. Kingston will stop selling the U3 product because the royalty fees are too great for the price sensitive flash memory market.
Kingston explained its decision in saying that extra bundled software means additional costs for consumers. The company already has its own similar platform to substitute for U3, according to company sources.
According to some IC controller design houses, SanDisk – the big player advocating U3 – charges about a 5% royalty fee for adopting the U3 platform.
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The CoSoSys Carry It Easy software we recently reported will now be found, pre-installed, on the ATP USB ToughDrive. The preloaded CoSoSys software will allow for quick and easy sync of email, contacts and personal bookmarks.
If not familiar with the ATP ToughDrive, it’s a ruggedized flash drive designed to withstand water, dust, static discharge and extreme temps.
Include the Secure It Easy software from CoSoSys and now you’re not only portable but iron-clad secure too.
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