Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Keith: I always ‘eject’ my USB flash drives before removing them from the computer because I heard that not doing that could cause the drive to get corrupted.
Someone saw me eject a drive the other day and said we don’t have to do that anymore.
My question is, can we now just pull the drive out of its socket or do we still need to eject it first? [Read more…]
Question from Kendra: I have three USB flash drives that I use to store various files that I use from time to time.
I’ve noticed that when I remove a flash drive and plug in a different one Windows uses the same drive letter (D:) for that drive that it was using for the previous drive.
Can that cause a problem? [Read more…]
Question from Aaron: I received a USB thumb drive in the mail. It was addressed to me but there was no return address.
Inside the envelope with the drive was a note saying the drive had a picture of my girlfriend with another guy.
I want to know who the guy is but I can’t open the JPEG file. When I click on it the screen just goes blank and I have to unplug the computer and restart it.
What am I doing wrong? [Read more…]
Question from Julie: I have a 64GB USB flash drive that I use to transfer files back and forth between my work computer and my home computer.
Both of these computers have Windows 10 on them.
I’ve been using this flash drive every day for about two years with no problems at all.
Starting last week every time I insert the drive into either computer I get a message saying the drive has a problem and needs to be scanned and fixed.
I’ve clicked the button to scan drive and fix the drive several times but I always get the same message the next time I plug it into a computer.
Is there any way to fix this problem or do I need to just replace the drive? I really like this one because it’s small and it attaches to my key ring.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Jane C.: I made a huge mistake Rick and I hope you can help me.
I accidentally clicked “Format” on the wrong drive and ended up formatting a USB flash drive with over 100 important photos on it!
Is there any way to “unformat” a drive that was formatted by mistake? Or maybe there’s some other way to retrieve the files?
I’ll be heartbroken if I’ve lost all those pictures!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]