it didn't go quietly into that good night

Due to my needs as an IT professional, I decided that I did need to get a new Cruzer Micro, however, my favorite model was not available, which is quite understandable, since that model was last popular in 2004. So I bit the bullet...

This is my new cruzer, which is quite a disappointment compared to my old cruzer micro. It is made of much thinner plastic than my original cruzer, and instead of having a nice case like the original, it's USB port retracts into the plastic. This way, there is no cap to loose.

However, there is a cost to it... There actually isn't any way to completely cover the USB port, and with the thin plastic, there is a possibility that the first time the drive goes through the was, and trust me, it will happen one day, it has a high likelihood of coming out in pieces. The worst thing about the new cruzer is the U3 software. It's supposed to manage the drive for you, enabling special features in Windows XP and crap like that. It tossed a "hovering icon" over on the lower left of my screen as well as putting an icon in the notification area (by the clock)... All without notifying me of what it was doing. It also auto-mounted a disk image into XP... And Mac OS X! I was so enraged by this fact, that I nearly returned the drive. However, after doing some digging, I found the U3 uninstaller on SanDisk's website and removed the damn software before it could drive me far enough up the wall to throw it into the garbage disposal.

I am a bit disappointed with this model flash drive as opposed to the older cruzer style, but then again, I could have paid twice as much for a cruzer titanium, but I didn't want to pay so much without knowing if the product would suck or not. The two-gig size is nice, and the so is the thin-ness of the device, yet at the same time, the giant orange LED is ugly and it's annoying that the drive is longer than the old version.

~sigh. I suppose I shall say that the verdict on the drive is still out for me... I don't trust it yet, so I'm doing some more stress-testing on the thing (namely, I installed a video game to it instead of to my notebook. Depending on how much the game modified the registry, I might be able to take the game to another Windows computer and play it there, which is pretty swankin', if it works.

There is one thing I can say for sure... I wish my original cruzer didn't die.