Whether you’re trying to increase your security at an internet cafe, tunnel your way to your home computer from your cubicle, or leave no trace on your friend’s borrowed computer, a flash drive turned portable privacy toolkit is invaluable.
While your best bet is to not lose your thumb drive in the first place, yesterday our readers expanded our tip to name your thumb drive with your phone number with several pretty clever ideas.
USB drives have lots of great uses, but they’re also easy to leave behind. One Lifehacker reader adds an extra degree of identification by making his phone number the volume label for his USB drives.
To mount an Android phone via USB and get access to its files, you have to connect it, turn on the screen, swipe down your notifications and hit a screen button. Install the doubleTwist player, and you only have to plug in.
Windows: Can’t decide whether you should commit your spare thumb drive to Windows recovery, Ubuntu or some other live-booting OS? Run MultiBootISOs on your USB drive, and you won’t have to choose — you’ll just choose between them at start-up.
Add Registry repair and editing to the list of Windows repairs you can make with a live Linux system, even if you can’t boot into Windows. An Ubuntu Forums member shows how to make specific registry tweaks and fixes from inside Ubuntu.
What can you do with a few gigabytes and a USB port? Quite a lot, with the right software. Learn how to encrypt your work, run whole systems, rescue Windows and customise your thumb drive with these USB-geared tricks.
Windows: Having a full Linux operating system on a USB thumb drive is pretty neat. Having that OS customised, with your own favourite apps and all your settings intact, is far more helpful. This Windows tool makes that possible.
Thumb drives are a standard part of any PC repair toolkit, but once you’ve used them on a suspect PC, you should always scan them for viruses. Here’s how to scan for viruses directly from the AutoPlay dialog.
