Tired of being nagged to back up your files? I've never done this before, but with Windows 7, I thought maybe it's time - I'd like to be able to restore this if something stupid happened.So I headed for London Drugs computer department, and a nice young man sold me one of these USB Flash Drives. The colour indicates its size in this series, and I got the 8 Gb one. I've just used it to back up my Windows 7 PC, and it was easier than I thought. I didn't even have to decide what to back up. Windows chooses whatever it considers to be required, and then it collects all that, and downloads it into the Flash Memory for you.
Out of 8 Gb, there was 7.5 Gb available after formatting and installing its own programming. Of that 7.5 Gb, there was 3.2 Gb unused after the backup was completed. The backup includes certain important Windows files, and everything from [All Users] of a personal nature such as your emails, documents, photos, etc. It takes a few minutes for the stick to be loaded but it's quite painless. This 8 Gb stick was $36.99 + tax of $4.44 = $41.43 total. And if we think about it, that's cheap insurance against a loss of data. It surprises me that such a small device can hold a complete backup for this PC. Technology is becoming simply amazing.
I've just found an electronics catalogue from 2004. Where they offer SD flash cards from ScanDisk with a capacity of 32 MB for 23 Euros, and of 512 MB for 179 Euros!! Unbelievable!
ReplyDeleteHow cheap these things have become! You can get GB-size cards nowadays for some 20 or 30 Euros. And there seems to be no end in sight!
Yes, it's really great! The prices have come 'way down in the past couple of years, and they're also making the new ones able to do more things.
ReplyDeleteThis Flash Memory Stick for example can also be plugged into a USB port and left there to act as additional memory, like supplementary RAM almost.
I'm not up on all the details, but maybe you should look into that, in case you could use that to help your 128 Mb RAM to do more.
When I wrote the first comment I couldn't think of the name of the program that is used to speed up your computer. It's ReadyBoost
ReplyDeleteand today I got another 8 Gb stick like the first one, so that this one can be used for ReadyBoost so that I can see how it works. After I've tried it for a while, I'll have more to say about it.