Theme and variations

[jhetley]

Perhaps a fugue. Raining this morning, temperature when I arose before the sun stood at about 50 F. No, I'm not going to rearrange that sentence.

Wandered through the friendly neighborhood Staples yesterday, buying a new pocket calendar to track meetings and such, and picked up a 1-gig USB flash drive for under $20. How the mighty have fallen.

Then I plugged the thing into the laptop (this Win98 desktop doesn't recognize flash drives, and the USB ports (2) hide out on the back, anyway...) and instead of just showing up as a drive, it popped up with a bunch of preloaded software. Yecch. No, I don't want Skype. No, I don't want Avast! -- already running AVG, and the two would fight. I considered running the synch program to automate backups, and the first thing it did was try to connect to the Internet...

Am I the only one out here who remembers original program disks pre-loaded with a virus???

Comments

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

No, you're not the only one who remembers that. I don't appreciate having software pop up that way when installing a new drive.

Win98 doesn't recognize flash drives on its own, but there are Win98 drivers for most, if not all, flash drives. Check the manufacturer's web site it you want to use yours with the Win98 computer. You can also get extension cables to help deal with the USB ports being in the back. Just get a USB extension cable, plug it in and leave the other end somewhere easy to get to, then plug devices into it instead of directly into the port. That can make life a lot easier.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Rather than a simple extension cable, I'd probably get a powered hub if I wanted to use the "drive" on the Win98 machine.

But this computer is destined for the midden-heap of history, anyway.

*mutters dark thoughts about the evil empire, thinks iMac...*