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.
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.
Windows: Having a portable version of Firefox on your thumb drive can be really convenient. Make Firefox, and OpenOffice.org and other apps, more adaptable and web-ready by installing Java Portable on that same thumb drive.
Windows only: USB Safeguard is a portable program that encrypts files on your flash drive in case you lose it. It also stores your email or phone number or shreds files in case you lose it.
When Windows goes wrong, it can go really wrong. Worse: Often it’s extremely difficult to save your system from Windows itself. Here’s how to use a simple USB drive to free space, remove viruses, rescue passwords and more from crunked Windows setups.
Chromium OS, the open source build of Google’s upcoming web-focused netbook system, was made into a thumb-drive-friendly build early on by a helpful hacker named Hexxeh. His latest build, ChromiumOS Zero, adds Chrome extension support, speed boosts, and other goodies.
Whether your must-have data lives in the cloud, on your laptop, or just on a different operating system, you shouldn’t have to use sub-par tools to get at it. These downloads work where you do, and they also just work.
