Carry a flash drive instead of a laptop

Windows Secrets Newsletter • Issue 126 • 2007-10-11 • Circulation: over 400,000

Table of contents

Top Story: Carry a flash drive instead of a laptop
Known Issues: Microsoft releases Excel fix but skirts issue
Wacky Web Week: Is it time for Tomb Raider to die?
LangaList Plus: Part three: reduce caches to speed performance
PC Tune-Up: Several unpatched vulnerabilities this week
Patch Watch: Hold off on patching MS SharePoint

Top Story

Carry a flash drive instead of a laptop

By Scott Dunn

You can avoid lugging a laptop everywhere by installing your favorite apps on a USB flash drive and running them on any computer you want.

I’ll guide you in selecting a flash drive that’s best suited for portable software and tell you which apps you should install.

First, get the right drive for your needs

You don’t need to put an entire operating system on a flash drive to make it a useful travel companion. Instead, just set up a flash drive with the applications and data files you need and plug it into any PC you’re able to use. (If you do want to run a reduced version of Windows XP on your flash drive, Windows Secrets editor-at-large Fred Langa explains how.)

Today, I’ll describe the best flash drives for portable software. Next week, I’ll show you the best apps to install on your new toy. (Not all apps will run from a flash drive.)

When buying a new flash drive for portable computing, you’ll want to consider speed, capacity, and whether to buy a so-called U3 drive, as I explain below.

Faster read rates are better. If you plan to do serious computing with a USB flash drive, you’ll want the fastest drive possible. First, make sure it’s USB 2.0 or “high speed USB,” not USB 1.x. Second, remember that the higher the read rate in megabits per second (Mbps), the more responsive your apps will feel. Ian Richards, editor of the Support Alert Newsletter, recommends a read rate of 15 Mbps or higher and lists some of the fastest flash drives available.

4GB drives provide the best value. Given the small size of many portable apps, it may not be necessary for you to buy the largest drive you can find. I was able to fit the Open Office suite, the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird e-mail client, and ten other utilities in less than 400MB. If you carry around very little data, a 1GB drive might be adequate for your needs. However, if you plan to also store 1,000 songs or 5 hours of video on your flash drive, that number of files can consume 4GB by themselves. You may find the slightly higher cost of a 4GB or 8GB drive worthwhile.

The table below compares basic features of some of the fastest flash drives currently available. The read rates shown in the table are from tests conducted by X-bit Laboratories on 1GB and 4GB and larger flash drives. You probably wouldn’t notice performance differences of less than 3 or 4 megabits per second. The table is sorted by price.

Table 1. High-speed flash drives tested by X-bit Laboratories.

Product	Read rate in Mbps	Capacity in gigabytes	Est. street price in U.S. dollars
Apacer Handy Steno HA202 200x	25	1GB	$26
Super Talent ALUMI-4GB-DH-S	31	4GB	$32
Corsair Flash Voyager CMFUSB2.0-4GB	33	4GB	$43
Buffalo RUF2-S4GW	33	4GB	$44
OCZ Rally2 OCZUSBR2DC-4GB	25	4GB	$59
Patriot Xporter XT PEF4G200USB	31	4GB	$64
A-DATA PD7	30	4GB	$68
ATP ToughDrive AF4GUFT1BK	31	4GB	$78
Corsair Flash Voyager CMFUSB2.0-8GB	30	8GB	$80

Although X-bit Labs didn’t test 2GB drives, you can find speed benchmarks of a few 2GB models at HardwareCanucks. In that site’s tests, the Corsair Flash Voyager GT was the only standout, with an average read rate of almost 33Mbps. It has a street price of $68 USD.

You may already own a flash drive with adequate storage capacity, but you don’t know whether its read rate is fast enough to run portable software. In that case, Windows 2000 and XP users can test a flash drive’s speed using a very simple utility, HD Tach, which is free for noncommercial use. For a free drive-testing utility that supports Vista, try CrystalDiskMark.

Don’t base your drive choice on U3

Some flash drives are labeled “U3″ or “U3 smart drive.” U3 is a technology promoted by U3 LLC, a joint venture between SanDisk (which makes many U3-compliant drives) and its subsidiary M-Systems, according to the U3-Info site. The idea is to let you store applications and data on a single flash drive and run them from any computer. U3 drives also provide an option for password protection.

To use U3 applications, you must buy a U3 flash drive (you can’t convert any old flash drive to U3) and install U3-compliant software. U3.com provides a list of both hardware and software that’s U3-compliant.

But U3 is hardly the only way to run software from a flash drive. Despite what SanDisk says, I successfully installed and ran ordinary software that’s not U3-compliant on a U3 flash drive. The main limitation is that non-U3 apps don’t automatically show up on U3′s pop-up LaunchPad menu.

For most people, the U3 option should be a much lower priority than getting a drive that is fast enough, big enough, and affordable. If two flash drives have the same features, however, buying a U3 drive does give you a bit more flexibility, since you can always remove the U3 software. SanDisk lets you download a U3-removal utility for its drives. U3.com provides a similar utility for non-SanDisk drives. SanDisk also provides a free tool for reinstalling the U3 LaunchPad, if you want it back later.

In part two of this series next week, I’ll describe free and easy ways to get software for your flash drive and use it securely.

Have a tip about Windows? Readers receive a gift certificate for a book, CD, or DVD of their choice for sending tips we print. Send us your tips via the Windows Secrets contact page.

Scott Dunn is associate editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He is also a contributing editor of PC World Magazine, where he has written a monthly column since 1992, and co-author of 101 Windows Tips & Tricks (Peachpit) with Jesse Berst and Charles Bermant.

Known Issues

Microsoft releases Excel fix but skirts issue

By Brian Livingston

Microsoft has released hotfix packages to correct an Excel 2007 error that makes cells that contain values close to 65,535 act as though they contain 100,000.

There’s still some confusion, however, on whether these hotfixes should also be applied to older versions of Excel and whether they resolve all Excel 2007 calculation errors.

Apply the hotfix and watch for further news

I reported on Sept. 27 that Microsoft had acknowledged a serious bug in Excel 2007. MS Excel group program manager David Gainer said floating-point numbers near 65,535 and 65,536 were being displayed in the spreadsheet program as if the cells contained 100,000. He wrote, however, that no actual calculation errors resulted.

Windows Secrets contributing editor Woody Leonhard showed in his Oct. 4 column that the problem goes far beyond a mere display bug. In fact, he says, Excel functions such as round( ) and mod( ) produce actual calculation errors that can ripple through an entire spreadsheet. Furthermore, the problem may also affect Excel 2003.

Microsoft this week released three separate hotfixes for Excel 2007 and the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Excel Services 2007. Contributing editor Susan Bradley examined Microsoft’s solution and recommends that people who rely on Excel install the appropriate fix as soon as possible. To get the updates, and to read Microsoft’s two related Knowledge Base articles on this problem, see the Oct. 9 entry in the official Excel blog.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s KB articles still assert that the error affects only the displayed value and cannot affect calculations. Comments on the official blog also indicate that the hotfixes should be applied by users of Excel 2002 and 2003 who use Microsoft’s converter to save spreadsheets in Excel 2007 format. This suggests that the calculation bug also affects the older programs, but the company isn’t directly saying so.

Finally, other comments on that blog indicate that additional calculation errors still exist.

I don’t believe we’ve heard the last about this Excel bug. Spreadsheet users who need accurate math should take Woody’s advice and install R, a library of floating-point routines by Thomas Baier and Erich Neuwirth — and watch for more details from Microsoft.

UPDATE 2007-10-18: Baier and Neuwirth are not the authors of R, they are authors of the add-ins known as RExcel, rcom, and R(D)COM, all of which use R. See the Known Issues column posted on Oct. 18, 2007.

The Known Issues column brings you comments on our recent articles. Brian Livingston is editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com.

Wacky Web Week

Is it time for Tomb Raider to die?

Even those who’ve never touched a gaming console in their digital lives have heard of Tomb Raider, the influential video game featuring the exploits of the heroic — and seemingly indestructible — Lara Croft.

Like its fictional heroine, the game also possesses a kind of immortality, the latest version from Crystal Dynamics being pretty much a remake of the original. But, as this hilarious animation from Australian-based writer and gamer Yahtzee Crowshaw suggests, more is not always better. (Warning: the piece uses four-letter words that some viewers may find objectionable.) Play the video

LangaList Plus

Part three: reduce caches to speed performance

By Fred Langa

This week, I travel through the Wild West to help our second Housecall winner hunt PC space hogs in Tacoma, Wash.

My trip west took me from dramatic, wind-sculpted landscapes, whose colors ranged from deep red to muted adobe, to the lush green of the Pacific Northwest.

Rock formations evoke classic Western settings

In the previous Housecall, you saw how to use some free, powerful tools to declutter a PC and speed boot times; how to resolve an address conflict on a small network; and how to test the basic security of an Internet connection. This is the third in my series of eight reports.

Leaving Longmont, I spent almost two weeks zig-zagging through Colorado and Utah’s most scenic parts: I traveled from Aspen to Saguache and then on to Montrose, Ouray, and Cortez, and from there to Grand Junction and down through Moab to Mexican Hat and Monument Valley.

As I headed west, the granites, schists, and gneisses of the Rockies gave way — rather abruptly — to the vivid brick-red and soft-beige sandstones of the West made famous in so many Hollywood cowboy movies. (Countless films have been shot in and around Monument Valley.) The soft sandstone is especially prone to wear by wind and water, creating innumerable naturally sculpted features such as arches, caves, domes, and so on.

Figure 1. Wind-sculpted sandstones (click photos to enlarge). These dominated much of my route through western Colorado and Utah. Sometimes the formations were grandiose and imposing, such as this formation (shot through my motorcycle windshield). Other formations were impossibly dreamlike and delicate.

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PC Tune-Up

Several unpatched vulnerabilities this week

By Mark Edwards

Microsoft released six security updates this week, so be sure to update your systems as soon as possble.

Unfortunately, Microsoft left a few security problems unpatched in its products, and there are unrelated problems with Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and Sun Java that you definitely need to be aware of.

Serious vulnerabilities in two Windows DLLs

Jonathan Sarba of the GoodFellas Security Research Team posted a notice of vulnerabilities in two Microsoft Foundation Class library files, mfc42u.dll and mfc42.dll, that might let a bad guy run code on your computer. A couple of applications among the many that are known to use these DLLs are HP’s All-in-One series and its Photo and Imaging Gallery software.

So far, I’m not aware of any working exploit code, but someone could release such code at any moment. Many applications come packaged with these two DLLs. According to US-CERT, there’s no known way to protect your computers without completely deleting the DLLs. Taking that step would probably break some of your software, so hopefully Microsoft will release a patch soon.

Java versions 5 and 6 need updates

Recently, four problems were reported in Sun’s Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

According to announcements by Sun, two of the problems can let a Java application make connections to remote systems. A third bug allows a hacked Java application to read and write local files and discover the location of the Java Web Start cache. The fourth bug could snare people who drag and drop files from a Java application to another app.

Thankfully, Sun released JRE updates to fix these problems. If you’re using Java Standard Edition versions 5 or 6 then you can download the version 5 update or version 6 update. If you’re using the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, then you can also download an update for that software.

Use MS Visual Studio kill bits as workaround

Two very serious vulnerabilities were discovered in the ActiveX controls that are part of Microsoft Visual Studio. These problems could let someone overwrite files on your computer or install a Trojan horse. Exploits are already on the loose, but fortunately you’re only vulnerable if you have Visual Studio installed on your system.

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Patch Watch

Hold off on patching MS SharePoint

By Susan Bradley

A pretty bumpy patch has just been released for SharePoint, but the rest of this week’s patch lineup is pretty tame.

We do have a few tricky issues to deal with, regarding updates for IE 7, Office 2003, and Vista, in addition to the other monthly security patches.

MS07-059 (942017)
SharePoint update beset by too many glitches

For those of you who are not administrators of SharePoint, you can stop reading right here and skip to the next topic. If you’re an administrator of Windows SharePoint Services 3 or Office SharePoint Server 2007, however, please pay close attention to both this article and the Known Issues section of Technet bulletin MS07-059.

Not only are the known issues with this week’s SharePoint updates quite extensive, but two related KB articles — 934525 for Windows SharePoint Services and 937832 for Office SharePoint Server 2007 — point out that you must back up your SharePoint site before applying the patches.

To back up the SharePoint site, there are a few methods and third-party programs you should know about, as listed in a blog post by Robert Bogue (an MVP recognized by Microsoft).

In my own testing of the updates on an SBS 2003 server with both SharePoint Services 3 and SharePoint Services version 2 installed, my system failed to restart the IIS Web sites. This issue is discussed in an official SBS blog post.

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The Windows Secrets Newsletter is published weekly on the 1st through 4th Thursdays of each month, plus occasional news updates. We skip an issue on the 5th Thursday of any month, the week of Thanksgiving, and the last two weeks of August and December. Windows Secrets is a continuation of four merged publications: Brian's Buzz on Windows and Woody's Windows Watch in 2004, the LangaList in 2006, and the Support Alert Newsletter in 2008.

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