SanDisk teaming with Microsoft for U3 replacement
Low level deets are sketchy, but when your source is a press release, that’s bound to happen, right? What we do know is that U3 mobile tech is getting an overhaul. If you’re not familiar with U3, it’s essentially a portable application approach to carry your software and settings on a USB drive; quite useful for us mobile sorts. SanDisk spearheaded the approach a few years back, and effective today they’ll be partnering with Microsoft to expand and replace the current approach:
"The new offering will be designed so that users can carry theirpersonal computing environment — including a customized and familiaruser interface, applications and data — on a flash storage device suchas a USB flash drive or flash memory card. This computing environmentwill be accessible on Windows XP- and Windows Vista™-based computerswith a USB port or flash card reader."
I emphasized in bold an interesting tidbit above because I’m wondering about the implications of it. Will we truly carry a full computing environment with us like you can with Mojopac? Will there be a portable XP or Vista interface, perhaps embedded in the flash? Perhaps I’m reading into it too much…
I’m with you Kevin, this could be huge. Wouldn’t it be nice to plug in a flash drive and XP some how virtualizes a desktop of your very own. One that you could run on any PC. Please Microsoft, make it happen.
I think you are reading too much into it. To me, it sounds like it will be more akin to logging in under a different user name, complete with your documents and personalized settings, but those settings will be stored on a flash drive instead of on the hard drive. Would be a good solution for people who use different Windows PCs, like between work and home.
I doubt Microsoft would put a full version of Windows on a flash drive. Even if they did, I imagine they will not stray far from their usual price point.
Sumocat is correct; they will never have full XP on a flash drive. But all they need to do is fuse a few technologies together. They already have apps that run off the flash dive. Now all they need is a GUI that emulates XP. Make it feel like they are running the OS. Have a start menu with all the apps that are installed on the drive and a My Documents folder. Use print drivers and network connection of the host machine. We don’t need a full blown OS, just make it feel like one.
I’m gonna bet that they’re going to apply the registry/file system virtualization stuff used by Windows Vista, so that applications will install on a flash drive without having to be specifically built with some third-party framework in order to store config data on the flash device.
Right now, that’s how U3 works… stuff like MojoPac attempts to accomplish that somehow, although it requires admin access to a PC in order to function properly.
If MS did this *without* admin access (since it’s virtualized somehow, duh)…. hey, that’d be even better!
(I’ve been reading up on how UAC works lately.. can you tell?)
The $114 32GB USB pen drive I bought off eBay is likely a scam (I got it last night and it certainly doesn’t store 32GB, but they say they’ll exchange it for one that will, yeah I know, har har har) but how long can it be before we do have affordable 32GB USB pen drives?
Something that size changes the rules for U3.