Got flash memory cards? They aren’t only for your digital
camera. Probably the coolest yet overlooked ways to use your
flash memory card is as floppy drive replacement. Think about
it, a flash memory card is really a form of storage disk.
Most notebook computers today don’t come with a floppy
drive anymore. I’ve personally been in situations where
I needed to share a file with someone and haven’t been able
to because they handed me a floppy disk.
If you already own a card or a digital camera, chances are
you already have the necessary equipment to read the card and
transfer files to and from them. If you don’t it’s
easy. Get yourself a flash memory card reader – they are
so inexpensive these days you can even pick one up free after
rebate if you watch the deals. Hookup it up to your computer
and pop in the card. It will show up on your computer as a new
drive. When you’re ready to save data to it, just drag and
drop. It’s no different than a regular floppy or hard drive.
Once you see in this light there is a whole bunch of things you
can use your flash memory card for and here are 5 ideas for you.
1. Use as a greeting card. Hey there’s always an occasion
around the corner. If you’re already thinking of sending
a CD greeting card – use your flash memory card instead.
With the large storage sizes you can afford to have multimedia
in your ecards too and when that person gets tired of it, the
card itself is a gift for their computing convenience. As if
that wasn’t enough, you can probably get by with less postage
too.
2. Use as media storage. One of the best things about flash
memory cards is how much its small physical size can pack in.
With memory sizes up to several Gigabytes, you could use it to
store your media like video clips, picture clips, audio files
and just about any downloadable content. Its small size also
makes it highly portable without taking up valuable space on
your notebook computer hard drive.
3. Sharing files or transferring files from one computer to
another. If you need to do this often, here’s a quick tip.
Carry with you a USB card reader. Many of them are very compact
and no heavier than your cell phone. Doing this has advantages
over carrying a flash memory drive. Flash memory cards are smaller
and a tiny catalog of cards can offer you much more memory than
a flash drive. Better carry two things than a bunch of drives.
4. Build yourself an ebook library. Are you a book worm? One
tiny flash memory card can store a lot of ebooks since most text
based files are smaller than media files. You can store whole
libraries of ebooks in various topics either on one card or dedicate
one for each topic you are interested in. Again, they are easy
to share and very portable – you’ll never run out of
reading material again even when on the road.
5. Run small software from it. Yes, there are tiny software
that don’t need to be installed and can run from the card
itself. This is particularly helpful when you’re using someone
else’s computer. Now you can carry your software with you
too.
Now that you know – gather up those flash memory cards
and start using them. Just because your new camera isn’t
compatible with it doesn’t mean you should let it go to
waste and the best part is, you won’t have to worry about
obsolete cards anymore.
This article was posted on December 06, 2005