Flash Drive Solves Some Dial-up Problems

Uploads and downloads at the library

Kathy (my sister-in-law) sent me some wildflower photos over a month ago. I've been wanting to post them and photos of my own as well, in the way I usually do on this blog!

However, my "good" computer has been having problems. I've been using an older and slower computer, and I couldn't get photos to upload from it. The connection with Blogger timed out and gave me a 404 before the photo completely uploaded. (We have dial-up internet, here in rural Kentucky.)

I thought about taking some photos on a CD to the public library to upload, but I couldn't get the CD burner to work on this little computer. And when I made a diskette of photos, the library's computer wanted to format it, not read it.

So yesterday, I bought a little flash drive that plugs into a USB port. It holds 1 GB of data, and it cost about $20. It was very easy to copy my photos to it. I took the flash drive to a library computer, plugged it in, and uploaded ten photos to the blog in about a minute.

At the library today, I realized that I could take my flash drive there for downloading also. For example, I could download the 47MB upgrade to iTunes that Isaac wants, bring it home, and install it. Over a dial-up connection, that download would take at least several hours!

I'm frustrated about my "good" computer and its problems, but I guess there's a silver lining to this cloud. Thank goodness, I do have this little Linux computer. And now, I suddenly see that a flash drive will be a big help to me in both uploading and downloading until a faster internet connection becomes available. I wonder why I've never thought of that before?!


In the interest of better blogging, I removed the above paragraphs from another post, and gave them their own heading.

Technorati tags: slow internet connection, dial-up internet, flash drive