Flash drives, old computers, and Windows

There are a healthy number of older PCs at work that I have to use sometimes. These aren’t old 386s - just older Pentium 4s or the occasional Pentium 3. Nonetheless, they all have USB 1.1, which is slower and older than the current USB 2.0 standard. When I plug my USB flash drive into one of these older computers, I get a message:

OK, fine. It can perform faster! I’ll click on the balloon:

So there are no faster ports on my computer. Even though Windows said that it can perform faster. In reality, it can’t. You know what the worst part of it is? Every time I plug my flash drive in, I GET THE SAME ALERT MESSAGE. Therefore, every time I plug my flash drive in, I get interrupted from my train of thought, have to deal with the alert box, and try to resume my original task. This is not easy (Altmann & Trafton, 2002), and it’s totally annoying.

Today, I wanted to eject my flash drive (named JasonFlash) from the computer, so I clicked in the Safely Remove Hardware button in the tray, and I get:

There’s an external hard drive (named Seagate) attached to the computer. Which one do I want to eject? I don’t have a clue! Windows lets users give their devices names. Maybe Windows should use those names sometimes - give us some retrieval cues so we know which device is the external hard drive that should never be removed and the flash drive that goes everywhere with me.

I have a feeling this is the first of many posts about Windows.