USB Stick Warning

[forsyth]

If you're looking at buying a new USB thumb drive, make sure it doesn't have the "U3 launchpad" on it. If it does, the thumb drive's been preformatted with a second partition, which has been made read-only. That partition contains the "U3 Launchpad" program, which autoruns every time you put the thumbdrive in. Every single time. And it installs files from that on your computer, which it claims to remove when you take the thumbdrive out. And you can't disable it, since the partition is read-only. It's slow, annoying, eats six megs of the thumb drive, and it's on no matter what. Plus it doesn't do anything the Portable Apps launcher doesn't do better, and less annoyingly. They finally made a U3 uninstaller, but to uninstall it, it has to reformat the whole drive and wipe everything you have on it. So if you're unlucky enough to get one with this piece of crap, use the uninstaller before you put anything on it. It's really not worth it at all, and annoying as hell. Another example of Stupid Lame Design.

Comments

[amazingadrian.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sometimes you get things that just make you wonder what people are thinking sometimes. Do these programs have any express purpose other than to acess the usb drive? Because it reminds me a lot of the malware Sony was hiding on their music cds back in the day.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

It lets you run specific programs off the thumb drive, that have been written in its proprietary code. It's virtually identical to the PortableApps loader, except slower and much more annoying.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Good to know.