I have a 1GB thumb drive and would like to know what usefull utilities. or other worthwhile programs, I should have saved on it.
Also, is it possible to boot from a thumb-drive?
Yes if the OS and BIOS allow booting from USB devices.
Why carry anything (semi-permanently) around on it? Unless your a diagnostic tech needing ready altitudes it’s just a storage device. If you wanted to play around you cold put a bootable Linux OS on it.
I have Portable Firefox on mine. Allows me the benefits of tabbed browsing on any computer, and also means i can carry all of my Bookmarks around with me.
Excellent stuff.
Here’s a good list of 'em. I’ve not nearly all of them on my Cruzer will plenty of room to spare.
Excellent idea - and you could go for Damn Small Linux, whose 50MB presence you’ll barely even notice.
Burn the utilities to a bootable CD, or three.
Use the thumb drive as temporary transportable storage.
Thank you for that link. I am so there. I am not allowed to install Firefox on my work laptop, and I hate using IE. 
Yes, it is. I found this out the hard way.
A month or so ago I was fooling around with our server at work, trying to install a Web app and configure IIS. Windows 2003 was complaining that it wanted a service pack installed, so I went ahead and let it do the auto-update thing off the web. It wanted to reboot, so I did.
It came up with “No OS found.” :eek:
Did I mention I was on a deadline, and had to get a ton of stuff done? I nearly had a heart attack. I check the CD drive, nothing there. Checked the floppy drive, nope, no floppy. Rebooted a couple more times. Cursed Microsoft and their damned auto-update. Contemplated suicide. Then decided to boot to a C: prompt and see what I could find.
Hmmm… “dir” listed a bunch of files that looked strangely familiar. In fact, that looked a lot like my USB drive contents. Is it plugged in? Yup. Could it be… did this @#$@# computer boot from a USB drive?
Yes, it did. :smack:
I unplugged the USB key and crisis averted.