Yesterday I bought a Sony micro vault on impulse. :( (poor impulse control!)

I plugged it in and it worked perfectly, just like everything else I have tried with my three week old Dell 2400 (that I ordered on a Friday and received on the next Wednesday).

I fooled around with it (writing and reading), did some surfing and decided to install a program, I used the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon and pulled it out..voila! the drive letter disappeared, no problem. I rebooted.

I inserted the drive again...again no prob, but, after a couple hours my comp locked up (and I wasn't using the drive at all). I went to the task manager and it said the flash drive was not responding (even though I was not using it). It was either shut down the comp or kill the process...I killed the process.

Everything seemed to be working until I tried to insert the flash drive again - the the comp shut down. When I powered back up...I got a 'thermal protection' message - 'press F1 to ignore or F2 to enter start-up'. Uh oh...fried!

So I took it back and replaced it with a Lexar JumpDrive. Same perfect initial performance, I used the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon, took it out and tried to re-insert...bang...power down again. Same 'thermal' message. I cold booted and it worked fine.

I am 'optimized for quick removal'...does that mean that I shouldn't use the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon? I hate to experiment after getting a 'thermal' message, but did. On a clean boot, I was to remove and replace the drive with no problem, it almost seems like the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon is only when you plan on powering down and not planning on reintroducing the removed item.

Any ideas, suggestions, thoughts, opinions? (I just pulled, then replaced the drive, it worked perfectly.)

TIA -


Steve

Message Edited by Steve_is on 11-30-2004 05:51 PM

Message Edited by Steve_is on 11-30-2004 07:02 PM