Batboard

Hi gang. It seems that I'm always without a particular piece of software (CPS/RSS or whatever) or missing system keys or codeplugs. So, I'm looking at putting together on a 128MB (or 256, whatever) all the applications that I would need.

Aside from CPS/RSS, system keys and codeplugs, does anyone have any suggestions as to what should also live on such a key? I was thinking Portable Firefox and all that so I can use a client's computer without worrying about passwords being stored and the like.

Thanks!

Firefox would definately be nice to have. I always keep some computer programs on my USB jump drive, but those programs are for another time and place Amongst some of my 'other' programs, I always keep an ad-aware copy on it.

I would recommend at least a nice 2gig flash drive (highest standard one out there I belive), which should be enough to hold a few CPS programs (with all those space hogging help files as we all know) and firefox, codeplugs, etc. It should run you close to around $80-90 bucks for one.

How about a hex editing software package? It may be useful for the occasional out-of-band frequency. I've always used Textpad for stuff like this... it's like Notepad on steroids.

i've got a 2gig thumb drive that i carry with me at all times with codeplugs, frequencies, and other info like phone books and email addresses. the best thing is that it works on a mac or pc. you will outgrow a 128 or 256 very fast.

Ditto...I outgrew my 256 MB and waiting for the 4GB to show up in the mail.

I use it mostly for my system information during hurricane season when I don't have access to my County drive when I'm at the EOC along with other program uses. A weekly update is about all I need to have user ID and TG ID tables along with system key's right in my pocket.

E-Bay is a great source for these if your not in a rush. The 4GB I picked up for a little over $60.00. The price included shipping and no tax, but if you are in a rush this is the time of year to pick one or two up locally if you don't mind rebates.

USB sticks are awesome! I don't know how I ever got along without one at this point.

I just like the fact I can boot a lot of newer "XP only" computers into DOS from the USB stick, and run whatever RSS I desire, without leaving a trace of it on the computer. Out of curiosity, has anyone had any success with using USB as outlined in these threads?:

http://batboard.batlabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=55522

http://batboard.batlabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=56415

I see lots of views, but no comments of success/failure.

If you really want the ultimate resource, you could put either "UBCD" (Ultimate Boot CD), or "Hiren's Boot CD" on the stick.

Todd

I highly recommend the sandisk cruiser models. They have U3, which will allow you to run a lot of stuff like portable fire fox and trillian. They have a titanium addition that costs a little more but is a lot more rugged then the regular plastic ones. I have a cruiser 2gb, and love mine!

To get an idea on pricing, I took a look at Newegg.com. They show 4Gig drives at $50-$120, and 2Gig at $30-$75, add about $5 for shipping.

They also currently show six 8Gig models in stock from around $130-$160, or if you really want to dress to impress, there's a 16Gig drive, although this isn't so much a USB Key as a 3"x2" card with a USB connector that pulls out.

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/f ... flash_card

I'm currently using a 512Meg Crucial Gizmo! for my personal drive, and have a 512Meg Cruzer mini and an old 128Meg Lexar JumpDrive for work. I'll probably be looking at getting a 2 or 4 Gig real soon.

Our main use for them at work is installing software on Mobile Data Terminals, they work great for that.

I will also recommend a larger drive. I outgrew my 2 gb in about a week and a half. They really are great for a lot of things, and I also like the U3. No matter where I am I can launch FireFox and stay out of Internet Exploder.

Oh, definitely have some sort of compression program such as Winzip, WinRAR, etc. You'd be amazed how many customer computers don't have any...

Todd

I would NOT recommend the "Kingston" brand of USB sticks. We get about 2-3 a week at the tech bench for repair from customers (not that we can actually "repair" them, it's more of a replace thing).

I have a 2GB "MyFlash" brand USB memory drive with an onboard hardware encryption chip so anything I put on the key is encrypted and the only means of retriving the data is a fingerprint reader on the drive... Their is a text password overide option incase you lose your hands or the fingerprint reader is damaged or something.

Best thing I have bought in ages and it keeps all my confidential files secure.

Sadly it doesn't have a little centric switch with an O and Ø on it.

Rayjk110 wrote:I would NOT recommend the "Kingston" brand of USB sticks. We get about 2-3 a week at the tech bench for repair from customers (not that we can actually "repair" them, it's more of a replace thing).

Thanks for the tip. I would've thought Kingston was a good brand, as they have high quality RAM modules. I guess it didn't transfer to the USB sticks.

Guys, I'm moving the thread to the computer forum, as that's technically where it belongs.

Todd

wavetar wrote:

Rayjk110 wrote:I would NOT recommend the "Kingston" brand of USB sticks. We get about 2-3 a week at the tech bench for repair from customers (not that we can actually "repair" them, it's more of a replace thing).

Thanks for the tip. I would've thought Kingston was a good brand, as they have high quality RAM modules. I guess it didn't transfer to the USB sticks.

Guys, I'm moving the thread to the computer forum, as that's technically where it belongs.

Todd

I had a Kingston for about six months. Worked great and never failed me until last night. That's only becuase my wife decided to wash it. lol

txshooter wrote:

wavetar wrote:

Rayjk110 wrote:I would NOT recommend the "Kingston" brand of USB sticks. We get about 2-3 a week at the tech bench for repair from customers (not that we can actually "repair" them, it's more of a replace thing).

Thanks for the tip. I would've thought Kingston was a good brand, as they have high quality RAM modules. I guess it didn't transfer to the USB sticks.

Guys, I'm moving the thread to the computer forum, as that's technically where it belongs.

Todd

I had a Kingston for about six months. Worked great and never failed me until last night. That's only becuase my wife decided to wash it. lol

Least it's clean now

For all you Canucks out there, I picked up a 2GB unit for $49.99 at Futureshop last night! 512MB units were only $19.99...picked one up for the wife for Christmas.

Todd

... never failed me until last night. That's only becuase my wife decided to wash it.

My SanDisk Cruzer has survived more that one washing. I've heard that these things fail after a certain number of write cycles. Has anyone run into that? I haven't.

I've gone to an SD reader that's the size and shape of, and works just like a, regular flash drive. My PDA and cameras and everything takes SD cards, so now they're all interchangeable. No more cables and docking stations.

anyone have any experience backing up files? What im trying to do is make it easy for the local public works supervisor to back up his my document files....he just lost everything he had with a fried harddrive...even the local college techies couldnt save it. so im looking for maybe a program or something so that all he had to do was insert the usb drive and it would auto backup his my documents file. thanks! -tnf

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820171121

Just ordered my 4GB Sandisk U3 Flash Drive from Newegg. It's not titanium, but for $72.57 delivered to my door in 3 business days; not too bad! There are no rebates to fart with either!

I had checked E-Bay first; but there are a lot of deceptive sellers selling drives with incorrect controllers etc.....be very careful over there.



Victor, KB5AKO

The U3 software sucks. I got rid of it within about three minutes of first using my 2GB Sandisk Cruzer. If you want a portable copy of Firefox etc, get one from http://www.portableapps.com .

mr.syntrx wrote:The U3 software sucks. I got rid of it within about three minutes of first using my 2GB Sandisk Cruzer. If you want a portable copy of Firefox etc, get one from http://www.portableapps.com .

mr.syntrx,

You sure weren't very patient; at least the day you deleted U3 within 3 minutes. I get that way sometimes as well. What kind of problems were you having? I want to know what to expect whenever I get mine. At least there is a provision to delete U3 onboard now. The earlier units did not have that capability. But, I've heard that once you delete it; you can't reinstall it. Hopefully, Sandisk will keep improving U3 and we'll end up with a decent version of U3. It looks like the U3 and portable applications are going to keep coming in. The list is growing.


Victor, KB5AKO

KB5AKO wrote: I had checked E-Bay first; but there are a lot of deceptive sellers selling drives with incorrect controllers etc.....be very careful over there.

You absolutely want to stay away from Ebay for any kind of flash drives, you're likely to end up with a fake. They're cheap enough now that there's no reason to take the risk to save a few bucks. I know there are fakes of Sandisk CF cards that are very hard to tell from the real thing until you speed test them and find that they're much slower than they should be. Also there were some fake USB keys going around that wouldn't let you create sub-directories on them.

For the guy asking about backup, take a look at the Western Digital MyBook drives, I just got a 250G model for $150, you can find smaller ones for under $100.

I install all CPS to MojoPac so I can use anyone's XP computer and not have to install, then uninstall CPS if I need to program a radio that only supports CPS. No trace of the CPS is left on the host computer once you pull your USB thumbdrive. Pretty Kewl MojoPac will even let you use your iPod instead of a thumbdrive. You can cram lots of crap into a 30 gig iPod

You can make many apps portable without MojoPac like Photoshop CE, antivirus software.

My portable USB contains:

Adware SE
DiskDefrag
Flash FTP
Kaspersky Antivirus
MS Messenger
Nero
NVU Webeditor
PDF Fox Reader
Photoshop CE
Registry mechanic
Thunderbird Email
Website Copier
WinACE
WinRAR
MojoPac
CPS
RSS

Get the biggest drive you can afford, because you'll run out of space fast. (like I did)

Cheers

KB5AKO wrote: mr.syntrx,

You sure weren't very patient; at least the day you deleted U3 within 3 minutes.

Well, I had dealt with that software before. On my own drive, I nuked it at once.

KB5AKO wrote:I get that way sometimes as well. What kind of problems were you having? I want to know what to expect whenever I get mine. At least there is a provision to delete U3 onboard now. The earlier units did not have that capability. But, I've heard that once you delete it; you can't reinstall it. Hopefully, Sandisk will keep improving U3 and we'll end up with a decent version of U3. It looks like the U3 and portable applications are going to keep coming in. The list is growing.


Victor, KB5AKO

My main issue is the software serves no real purpose. You can achieve the exact same result without the useless software using portable builds of those apps, such as those from http://www.portableapps.com, without useless middleware.

To add to that, the U3 software is bloatware. It slows down older machines significantly, it often leaves various files and registry keys behind on a machine it is executed on, and causes some fairly strange problems on machines with strict security policies, like preventing you from accessing anything at all on the device - or just locking up the machine right up.

The U3 platform is closed, and is only open to vendors that U3 chooses to admit. This severely reduces the number of possible apps that may show up for the platform.

The U3 software also performs a lot of write operations to the drive in the background. Flash memory has a very finite number of write cycles that may be performed in its lifetime. The launchpad will reduce the service life of your drive.

As the Alcoholic Nun Hater said
You can't go past a WD MyBook.
I was so impresed with the pro version which has USB and Firewire that after a week playing with the one I bought for work, I bought one for home.
I have most stuff on my ML900 laptop but it is only a 40G hard drive so the WD MyBook is 500G and holds all manuals for our SZ as well as most of the portables and mobiles in PDF's. (I'd love Quantar/Quantro and MTR2000 in pdf if its around, thats all I'm realy missing)
I also have images of CPS, the PMR suite, Moscad disk images and files as well as the usual Miscrosoft disk images as well as a movie or two in case like KS4VT I have to move into the EOC with "her indoors" and the kids which last time was for a week and I would have killed for the MyDisk.