It just occurred to me that with the ever-increasing speed of memory cards, surely this is going to be the way people carry their data around with them in the future. This might not sound too groundbreaking to most people but let me explain some of the implications. Once these flash drives become comparatively fast with conventional hard drives then you can start to imagine some of the possible applications. Just imagine walking up to any PC popping in your memory cards and being able to run from it any of your favourite applications. You would no longer have to carry round your laptop with you, it just a memory cards so long as you would be able to plug it in wherever you ended up.
The reason why this hasn’t happened so far is because of the size of memory cards is limited to just a few gigabytes if you’re lucky. Also the speed of these cards has been a little bit slower than a conventional hard drive. So you could run a large application like Photoshop from a flash drive, but it would probably run a bit slowly. Also, you wouldn’t be able to fit all of your documents and all of your applications on a single flash drive.
This is all set to change however. Although they are in prototype stage, and used in high-end applications such as the military, such wonder drives are now in existence. As you might expect the price of these drives runs into thousands of pounds on their own, but as is does everything in the computer industry the price will fall over time.
On the other hand, web applications might get there first. If you haven’t already noticed Google have introduced lots of web based applications to compete with the likes of Microsoft word and Excel. Named Google docs, you can access all of your files from any Internet enabled computer in the world. The drawback with this type of setup is that if your intellect goes down then you can’t do your work. Perhaps as Internet connections become more reliable (that would be nice), these will be a viable alternative to Microsoft office.
Zach Hope is the author of Speed-Up-Windows-XP.com, a site that can teach anybody to
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