5
Things You Can Do With Flash Memory
by: Lynn
Chan
Got flash memory cards? They aren’t
only for your digital camera. Probably the coolest yet overlooked
ways to use your flash memory card is as floppy drive replacement.
Think about it, a flash memory card is really a form of storage
disk.
Most notebook computers today don’t
come with a floppy drive anymore. I’ve personally been in
situations where I needed to share a file with someone and
haven’t been able to because they handed me a floppy disk.
If you already own a card or a digital
camera, chances are you already have the necessary equipment
to read the card and transfer files to and from them. If you
don’t it’s easy. Get yourself a flash memory card reader –
they are so inexpensive these days you can even pick one up
free after rebate if you watch the deals. Hookup it up to
your computer and pop in the card. It will show up on your
computer as a new drive. When you’re ready to save data to
it, just drag and drop. It’s no different than a regular floppy
or hard drive. Once you see in this light there is a whole
bunch of things you can use your flash memory card for and
here are 5 ideas for you.
1. Use as a greeting card. Hey there’s
always an occasion around the corner. If you’re already thinking
of sending a CD greeting card – use your flash memory card
instead. With the large storage sizes you can afford to have
multimedia in your ecards too and when that person gets tired
of it, the card itself is a gift for their computing convenience.
As if that wasn’t enough, you can probably get by with less
postage too.
2. Use as media storage. One of the
best things about flash memory cards is how much its small
physical size can pack in. With memory sizes up to several
Gigabytes, you could use it to store your media like video
clips, picture clips, audio files and just about any downloadable
content. Its small size also makes it highly portable without
taking up valuable space on your notebook computer hard drive.
3. Sharing files or transferring files
from one computer to another. If you need to do this often,
here’s a quick tip. Carry with you a USB card reader. Many
of them are very compact and no heavier than your cell phone.
Doing this has advantages over carrying a flash memory drive.
Flash memory cards are smaller and a tiny catalog of cards
can offer you much more memory than a flash drive. Better
carry two things than a bunch of drives.
4. Build yourself an ebook library.
Are you a book worm? One tiny flash memory card can store
a lot of ebooks since most text based files are smaller than
media files. You can store whole libraries of ebooks in various
topics either on one card or dedicate one for each topic you
are interested in. Again, they are easy to share and very
portable – you’ll never run out of reading material again
even when on the road.
5. Run small software from it. Yes,
there are tiny software that don’t need to be installed and
can run from the card itself. This is particularly helpful
when you’re using someone else’s computer. Now you can carry
your software with you too.
Now that you know – gather up those
flash memory cards and start using them. Just because your
new camera isn’t compatible with it doesn’t mean you should
let it go to waste and the best part is, you won’t have to
worry about obsolete cards anymore.
About The Author
Lynn Chan simplifies computing and computer care issues for
new notebook computer owners. Start protecting your investment,
with a free tutorial available at http://www.notebook-computer-infocenter.com/5days-to-a-healthier-notebook.html.
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