An impulse buy.....

[poltr1]

Last week, I went to OfficeMax to take a look at the items on their clearance table. Next to the checkout, they had a pile of SanDisk Cruzer 1 Gb flash-memory drives for $17.99. This was the price after their instant rebate, and it was a significant price cut from the regular price. So I went home with one.

Yesterday, I found out that the price had dropped to $14.99. (Argh.) And they had 2 Gb flash drives for $24.99. So I braved the weather and took home a 2 Gb drive last night.

They won't work on the laptop, but it works on the desktop (now that I have XP on it). I can also use it to shuttle files to and from work, or anyplace I go that has a USB 2.0 port.


These two drives feature U3 technology, which is supposed to enable flash drives to store both data and the programs to run them. Imagine taking your flash drive to a computer that doesn't have Microsoft Office, but your flash drive does. U3 will enable you to read and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint docs on them, and not leave any trace behind after you take the flash drive with you. Or if you're traveling out of town, all you need to take is the flash drive and not a bulky laptop.

There isn't a U3 version of MS Office out yet, but ThinkFree Office can do the job today. Or so their propaganda says. I'm going to try it out.

So far, this technology looks promising. I just hope more vendors (other than SanDisk) hop on the bandwagon.

Comments

[filkergem.livejournal.com]

Portable Applications can be built without any fancy technology. Check out http://www.portableapps.com/ for tools that will let you manipulate your Office documents on any portable memory device. I've got a Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl environment, GNU emacs, and a number of the other applications on my 1Gig USB stick - I've been able to do some decent development on it with several different PCs.

Great prices, though!

[poltr1]

Great prices, though!

Indeed. I much prefer instant rebates to the tradiotional rebates. No sending in receipts and proof-of-purchases. No more waiting. And no more tying up my money.

[poltr1]

I looked at portableapps.com earlier today. It appears to be a more open (i.e. less proprietary) standard than U3. I also noticed that Firefox and Thunderbird are available for portableapps.

I think I'll give it a try in the coming weeks.