Many USB flash drives come pre-installed with software called U3. U3 is a small operating system that allows U3 enabled flash drives to run applications (like web browsers, email programs, password managers, and more) straight from the USB flash drive. The advantage is that you can use these applications on any computer with a USB port. 

However, if you don't have a need to have these "portable" applications and you don't work between many computers, the extra time required for the USB drive to initialize the U3 software can be an irritant. If you have a USB drive with U3 software and you don't want or need the U3 software, you can uninstall or remove the U3 software by downloading this utility (click here) to remove the U3 functionality. One word of caution; this utility will erase everything on the drive in the process, so backup any data on the flash drive that you don't want to lose before removing the U3 software. 

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Tags: backup, browser, download, email, install, remove, uninstall, Word

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Hardware Tips, Riding Shotgun with Rick. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.