Inspired Photography

I’ve been following this guy’s Flickr stream (here I’ve linked to his Blogger page) for some time now and he is, in my estimation, one of the best for strobe work with kids. His photography is wonderfully imaginative and he is creating a treasure trove that his girls will have to value for a long, long time. Don’t know how he does it, but he’s good.

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Flash Drive Has No Flash

I ordered a Dell laptop for my wife a couple of months ago. It was backordered for like 4 weeks. While ordering the laptop I also had the option to order a “color-coordinated” 4GB USB flash drive. I figured, “why not”, she needs a new one and besides, the price was good ($20) and it was the same color as her laptop. What could go wrong? So a month or so later the laptop arrives, I set it up, and put all the parts/pieces including the USB drive into her laptop bag and away she goes.

Well, last night she needs to transfer some data from her laptop to my desktop so I go looking for her new flash drive. I pop the drive in and…..nothing. It shows up in Windows Explorer, but it won’t launch. I try formatting it…no good. I change the drive letter, put it in different USB ports (front of computer, back of computer), put it in my Mac. Nothing. This is the first time the drive has been used and for the first time in my experience, it looks like I’ve got a defective USB drive.

No problem, I’ll just return it to Dell. Wrong! Turns out that Dell won’t let you return it if it’s more than 21 days old and it doesn’t say “Dell” on it. Doesn’t matter if it’s broken. If it’s more than 21 days after you bought it (mind you, it took more than that just to get here) then you are out of luck. End of discussion.

So here’s what I learned from this (fortunately) inexpensive event. 1) Test everything you get from a vendor, especially the third party stuff right after you get it. Even if it is something you might normally not use right away–test it right away. If you don’t use it for a couple of weeks, they aren’t going to let you return it even if it is defective. 2) Beware of Kingston DataTraveler 110 4GB USB drives. Even if the ad says they are “reliable”, they aren’t. Or at least this one certainly wasn’t.

Postscript: I ordered a $10 no-name 4GB USB drive from this website. For $9.99, including shipping, I can get two of these for the price of one Kingston and still come out ahead even if the first one doesn’t work. I guess sometimes it pays to be cheap.

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