You too can remove U3

February 12, 2007 in Stuff

USB flash drives are a wonderful way to store data and carry it with you on the move.

Just a bit taller than a small box of matches and about the thickness of a one pound coin, they’ve also dramatically come down in price recently.

You can pick up a 1GB drive for around £10 and often a 2GB for £20, but watch out what drive you are getting as it can be a bit of a hassle using them.

Many flash drives use U3 technology developed by Sandisk and M-Systems. In principle, U3 is a great idea as it allows you to turn your flash drive into your workspace and whatever PC machine you use, you can make it your own. It comes pre-installed with software and you can save on the flash drive data that you may have created on another machine.

So in theory that all sounds good. You can take and use your data anywhere. You can carry programs on it and they can work on any other machine.

But the downside is that U3 autoboots, which means if you go into a digital photo processor shop and install the flash drive, it won’t be accepted by the computer.

This has happened to me on a number of occasions.

So what do you do? Well the answer is quite simple, uninstall the U3 software than comes with the flash drive.

Again, until recently this was not information widely given out by U3, but now you can go to the U3 website and install software that then helps you to uninstall U3. It does seem a bit odd, that you have to install software just to remove U3, but it does work.

And with all the special offers around to tempt you to buy a flash drive, at least you now know that you don’t have to keep U3 on your flash drive if you don’t want it.

And of course, the best time to remove U3 is when you get a new drive. Otherwise, trying to remove it later on means you will also wipe the drive of any other data.