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
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