hey, I just bought my first flash drive ever... (yeah i'm late) but I was wondering what kind of fun things I can do with it... I wanna know the craziest things anyone has done... I mean, i could install a game or an os, that's kinda cool... But i can't think of anything that'd be really awesome... a little help on idea's and or the process of getting there would be cool. ( and i don't really want to stuff my flash drive into a rubber frog/duck/cow... so none of that please) haha. :-p
 
1 gig memorex "travel drive" is what i'm runnin... any good ideas would be awesome! thanx

The coolest thing I can think of doing with a flash drive is running an OS on one of those 16GB Corsair's.

Put your flash drive one one rail on a train track and a coin on the other and see which one looks coolest when they get run over.

It would be very slow. Seek times on a flash drive are fast but transfer times are slooooowwww.
 
Check out http://portableapps.com/
I keep portable Firefox and Thunderbird on mine plus a bunch of general tools and files I need to have for work or for helping friends remove malware etc..

haha, yeah, that might be a good idea... but i kinda want to keep it functional (the train idea).. that and i'd have to find a train somwhere, and find out when it runs every day... that's requires getting up from my computer... anyway.
 
Some tools might be nice... and yes, the transfer rates on BIG files are terrible... but much faster on a mass of small files (600mb of music transfers 2x as fast or more than a 600mb movie) at least for me.  I was kind of wondering why more devices don't have usb ports just for thumb drives (eg car stereos, mp3 players, etc.) you know, make in dash cd players obsolete, haha.  especially with the price of flash being down so low now. i mean 10 bucks a gig was unheard of last year, and now it's common place. :-p

Now that would be cool; run Netware on it.  I don't know if it ever had USB drivers though.

Clarion does have an in dash unit that you can hook up a flash drive directly into the face of it.
 
Where & how did you get the portable firefox?  Would be nice for using my schools computers, I hate IE.

Portable Firefox can be installed on portable apps. Just look above.

I have used it as a Windows "pagefile.sys" before. It is OK. I have 4GB of Main Memory DDR2, so it does not help much. Right now, I am hunting down "free" portable application to store on my flash memory stick. So far, I have found Firefox, Acrobat Reader, and Adobe Photoshop.

http://portableapps.com/  
 
Theres lots on there...

hummm, I wonder if gimp will work on a thumb drive.

 
Thanks. Works great!  

any app that stores all its files in its home directory should be able to do it.

You can do a lot with a flash drive:
 
1. Use it to store and transport files (duh.)
2. Put syslinux and a live CD's files on there and boot the computer without having to burn a CD.
3. Use the trick from #2 to boot a computer that has a dead HDD and no CD drive. Much easier than PXE netbooting.
4. Use it as a paging file disk with virtually zero access latency.
5. If it's big enough and the computer will boot from USB, use it as a SSD in a computer.  
6. Wear it around your neck to say "I'm a geek! Hear me roar!!"

You can copy save files over to it and hack your XBOX.
You can remove the casing and encapsulate it in a lego.
You can get a wireless bridge that supports USB drives, then hide it away for secure, stealproof storage.
 
You can sharpen it to a fine point and toss it like a ninja star.
 
You can put porn on it and put it in a school computer. Auto play will begin playing the videos automaticly. (make sure volume is up for maximum effectiveness).
 
To MU: Are you saying that creating a PXE boot server is not fun or exciting? lol.

PXE is a pain when all you're trying to do is boot one computer.

I use portable Firefox and Portable VLC off of my OCZ Rally Gen1 1gb USB Key.  Its very fast, and is useful on my dads laptop, on which he doesnt want any new programs installed on.
 
My dad and I have 6 USB keys alltogether:
1x Sandisk Cruzer Micro 256mb
2x Sandisk Cruzer Micro 512mb
1x EP Memory 1gb
1x OCZ Rally Gen1 1gb
1x 2gb ADATA key
 
The OCZ is by far the best.  The ADATA is not that great and takes up a lot of room.  The EP memory and Sandisk keys are okay.  If I were to get a new key it would be the 4gb OCZ Rally2 for $40 or so
 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820227145

cool... I saw that ocz rally 2 on newegg just last night. it looks good...  And i think you can put pretty much any program you want onto a flash drive... like diablo 1 !!! that'd be somthing to take to school, hahaha. Anyway, if you read the "computer use policy" 99% of the time you can do run any program you want as long as you don't install it... so if it's on a flash drive i think you're good... technically you could have 4 flash drives.. boot up ubuntu, and have a few other progs without ever installing a thing. (4 drives would be faster than one massive one)  just plug em all in and reboot!
you say clarion huh? I was thinking more like just somthing that fits in your dash and reads folders/mp3 off of usb connected stuff.. with a power amp... screw cd's flash drives are much easier and smaller.

You can install programs onto a key, but when you try to use it on another PC, you have to install the program. I did this with the Imperial Glory Demo.
 
You can hack the program to work off of a flash drive.  That, either or get portable apps, or U3 ones

 
Gimp portable. Also on portableapps...