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U3 Portable Smart Drives pros and cons

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TucknDar:
So I just bought a U3 smart pen drive (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U3 and http://www.u3.com/) thinking that I need a bit of a portable "office" for university and maybe using others' computers. Before buying it I only scratched the surface of that U3 stuff, and thought it sounded excellent. Now I'm not so sure... Not that it's bad or anything, but I'm not sure whether there's any real benefit to running my portable software U3 style or just "regular portable" (like http://portableapps.com/).

some Pros:
Autorun when inserted. Since U3 involves mounting two partitions, one of them is a virtual CD-rom drive with CD autoplay features, that'll start the U3 launcher on the other regular flash partition. (read above links for better explanation)
Compressed format. Not that important, but space on the flash drive is saved for other things. With 4 gigs of space, I don't know if a couple hundred kb's matter ;)
With an AHK script, most apps can be "U3ized"Take a look at U3Helper!

some Cons:
Needs two drive letters. While this is no problem on my home system, it can be a problem on a university or other "networked" areas, where the system might not allow more than one drive letter for inserted flash drives. I know the place I study gives me problems with this, thus making the drive pretty much unusable  :(
Needs to uncompress to run. While compression may save space on the drive, I think it makes all apps a wee bit slower since it needs to decompress them to fixed drive to run.


Since I've only recently started using this stuff, these lists are small, but I'd like other's input as well.

Both pros and cons with the U3 system and/or the "regular" portable solution are very welcome!

mrainey:
I never figured out any "pros" to U3, so uninstalled it.

nite_monkey:
I just use regular portable apps, they are good, portablefreeware.com has a massive list of portable apps. My Brother had a U3 drive, but then he got rid of the U3 part, it took to long to load, so now he has a regular 4 gig flash drive.

Tekzel:
U3 is neat and all, and I still have mine set up with it, but I am considering removing it.  Portableapps.com has a launcher much like it that is less wierd. As for the auto run thing?  Eh.  With XP you can basically autorun it anyway with the autorun.inf with one click on the little window that comes up on removable device insertion.  I have it password protected and that is the only reason I haven't removed U3 from it.

TucknDar:
Well, I took the plunge and uninstalled U3, and unless there's some significant improvement with that system, I'll stick with regular portability :)

The autorun hasn't worked for me in quite a while (I suspect there's a conflict with the shell I'm running, Litestep, since autorun works when explorer is shell), but I use the excellent service USBDLM (USB Drive Letter Manager) to take care of the USB drives on my system (pen drives and external hard drives), and that also fixes autorun! I don't know yet if my university supports autorun.inf from pen drives, but if it doesn't it's still a small sacrifice.

But please continue with arguments or tips for portable apps in general :)

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