The Ultimate Do-it-all USB Key
My own USB key is used mainly as a kind of digital storage – a place to store various files while you carry them from one location to another. And that’s fine; it’s what a USB key was made for. The thing is, there are also plenty of applications that you can load onto a USB drive, and they could make your life much easier. With some advance planning and setup, your USB drive can be more than a simple storage device; it can be a powerful tool that keeps you fully connected and functional when you’re on the road without your laptop.
Most of these applications require very little space; you can run them all from the same 2GB USB key. But given the low cost of 8GB drives like the Kingston DataTraveler 100 ($111 list, www.kingston.com), we recommend a little extra room. And when we say running these apps, we mean it; they can all—absolutely all—live at the same time on the same USB key, since everything uses a FAT file system (even the Linux install). Set aside 30 minutes and you’ll discover that, yes, you can take it with you.
