Tech Review

One of the weirdest things about my purchase of Vista at Staples is that all of the bonuses I received were incompatible with Vista. Since I was going to Army training, I was particularly excited about the U3 Attache' thumb drive. The Army usually doesn't provide internet access when training; at least not in the dorm-like rooms. They do usually provide a computer-room (with heavily restricted access-[no blogs, for example]) and a thumb-flash drive would be particularly handy in such a situation. With the drive, I would be able to run my browser with my shortcuts, use ftp, download email from yahoo and other Army-banned sites, and save downloaded files to take back to my laptop.

U3 is a built-in program on my flash drive. When I plug my flash drive into a computer, U3 acts like a cd-rom drive from which I can launch apps like Firefox and Open-office. It's pretty cool, although not completely necessary as one can do the same thing with applications from portableapps.com. But PNY doesn't support its product. They don't provide the update to version 1.4 of U3 which supports Vista. Not only that, they don't mention the update nor do they even provide an email address to which you may inquire. Boo on PNY.

PNY Attache 1GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive ( PFD01GU20RF )