Along with the huge growth in popularity of USB flash drives has come an equally large choice of devices to buy and places to buy them from. The number of brands, sizes and shops is quite bewildering.

So it is quite natural to start thinking of USB Sticks as “commodity items” – that they are all essentially the same. After-all, aren’t all the memory chips really made by just 3 firms anyway? So why not just get the most gigabytes for your money or buy one on looks alone?

The fact of the matter is, all memory sticks are not created equal.

If you have heard about Linux you’ve probably heard that it is free, quicker than Windows, more secure than Windows, immune to viruses and very complicated. And details aside, those rumours are fairly accurate.

Like many relatively cheap high-tech items, the number of counterfeited, faked and hacked USB Sticks is enormously high. If you buy a flash drive from eBay and any number of budget internet shops (including some Amazon zShops), and it seems like a very good deal, then the chances are you might well have bought a fake.

Yesterday I was working on a job which started off as a simple task, became a complicated affair and then turned out to be quite  straightforward after all. Primarily though, it was good reminder that things are not always what they first appear to be...