Just have to throw in a complaint against Sandisk and their decision to incorporate U3 on their Cruzer Micro's. As I wrote in my last post I have been looking into putting the latest version of the big brother of Damn Small Linux (DSL-N) on a USB flash drive. I felt I needed to have another drive so I went to the local Clas Ohlson store and got myself a 2GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro. I already have a 512MB Cruzer which I like. Later I noticed the new disk comes with U3 software on it - I had heard about it so I knew what to expect and I think it's a neat idea to be able to bring your environment with you and not leave a trace on the computers you use. After all that's partly why I like DSL... I thought I'd just uninstall it if I didn't like it. Turns out I didn't, I ran it on my work computer first and it seemed to work ok but it just didn't seem like something I could use regularly.
So, how to uninstall?
First I discovered there was an update from Sandisk but for some reason the installer could not download it. Seemingly had something to do with the network at work since I later found it worked from another network. While there I found two tools, the Launchpad remover and the Launchpad installer. Second I noticed that the U3 software was located on a virtual cd-rom and I was unable to get rid of this by any "normal" means - I used OpenBSD and Slackware Linux to have a closer look at the device but it looked like real hardware. Reading through U3's site I understood that it actually was a hardware thing so I could not get rid of it by any standard means. The Launchpad remover seemed to be what should do the trick however. And trying the stick in my home PC (Windows XPSP2, AMD dualcore) it did not run well - it took ages to start, plus the application claimed that the stick "is not a Sandisk U3 device". Annoying does not begin to describe it!!! I tried running both the launchpad tools (remove and install) but same answer, "please insert a Sandisk U3 device" (or something along those lines).
Luckily U3 also provides their own removal tool for U3 sticks from other vendors, but it actually worked fine for me! Then I found a couple of mentions about similar problems so for fun I tried both tools on my work computer (couple of years old, Windows 2000SP4) and lo, it worked great.
Conclusion
Sandisk's U3 tools/drivers are not compatible with WinXp on a dualcore box. On a longshot it could be vmware that interferes as well, but I don't know and don't care much. Plus, it's quite useless if you anyway don't always run Windows. The amount of space taken by U3 is not large but it's a waste nevertheless (for me! I don't have any beef with the idea as such) and an annoyance, and it seems to be a hack as the quality of the code is not up to what I would expect from someone trying to sell a sort of turn-key solution for mobile computing.
I'll try my own hand at this, thank you, so that I know what's going on, using Linux or something else.
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