This week’s tip applies to USB flash memory drives – also called pen drive, jump drive, thumb drive, key drive, or memory stick.

When you stick the USB drive into one of the USB ports on your computer, Windows 2000 and up will automatically recognize it and allow you to access it just like a floppy disk, Zip disk, or the CD-R/RW. They come in various shapes and sizes from 32 Megabytes to 2 Gigabytes.

After recognizing it, you’ll see an icon in the notification area on the right side of the Start taskbar. Its tooltip is ‘Safely remove hardware’.

DO NOT JUST TAKE OUT THE USB DRIVE! Removing the USB drive from your computer takes some caution. You can always shutdown your computer normally, then remove it afterward, or follow these steps:

1. Click on the  button in the notification area of the Start bar.
2. You’ll see the message
   (On some computers you may show several of these messages with different drive letters.)
3. Click on the message for that drive (letter) to remove. If you have only one, click on that message. This allows Windows to check to see if any open programs are still using the USB drive; if any are, Windows will give a message that the drive is busy and can’t be removed yet. You can try again later.
4. Windows will give you a message when it is OK to remove the drive. Only then can you safely remove it (and plug in another, if you desire).