I hate you. I truly, terminally, passionately hate you. You’re a fucking piece of insane, mind-boggling junk. Having used computers for more than 2 decades now, I can assure you that you are, without a shred of a doubt, the crappiest, lamest machine I have ever used. It makes me sad that you’re the one who survived, because you obviously deserve it the least.
And now for the question of the day:
- I bought a brand new USB memory stick. Looks great.
- I have been using it for less than a month, sharing files between 2 machines (Win2K, WinXP).
- And today out of the blue, I’m told that the stick is “write protected”. I can’t add files to it. I can’t remove files from it. I can’t even reformat the sucker. Google tells me that this is a common problem (!!) but none of the “solutions” I found online worked.
- Help? Anybody knows how to unlock that thing?
For all I can see, it looks like I wasted my money on one more piece of PC garbage, and I can just throw it away and buy another. This is fucking ridiculous. It makes my blood boil that this so-called “user friendly” PC is in fact a fucking clueless money-making bastard that couldn’t care less about users. If you would care about users you would allow me to install VC9 on Win2K, for a start!
December 21st, 2009 at 1:38 am
Maybe you should try to look for a specialized format tool on the manufacturer’s website?
December 21st, 2009 at 2:52 am
Are you sure your usb stick doesn’t have a mechanical write-protect switch accidentally switched on?
December 21st, 2009 at 4:09 am
I bought Mac because it got tired of similar crap too… now I just have to wait another 10 years so that xcode will catch up with visual studio. oh well…
December 21st, 2009 at 4:59 am
No write-protect switch, no. The registry hack didn’t work. The various repair / reformat tools I tried didn’t work. I checked the manufacturer’s website, read the FAQ, found nothing useful. In the end I went back to the shop where I bought it, and had it replaced. The guy at the shop told me he had the same problem at home and that there was “no solution” (…).
December 21st, 2009 at 6:52 am
Use Dropbox instead of a memory stick
December 21st, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Hi,
Did you try booting into linux, e.g. with an Ubuntu live CD, and then maybe write zeroes to the raw device, as root user?
I once got bitten by fancy USB sticks that come with all sorts of ‘extras’ and OS features, that you really do not want, and have to take extra steps to get rid of them.
February 14th, 2010 at 5:41 am
I can imagine…
I have adopted the strategy of buying the cheapest memory stick with a durable looking design. On the principle that the manufacturer will be less tempted to “add value” with fancy features which mess things up. The 8Gb PNY memory stick i got works great and doesnt have any annoying apps.
March 9th, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Suggest getting yourself a parted magic cd and boot from it. Should be able to format and partition the thing snap snap.
Also, suggest switching to using sd cards from a reputable manufacturer like kingston, and use an sd card reader. Some sd card readers are shaped like a usb stick, so hey, that’d be win.
Also, since you’re (probably) the smartest graphics guy I’ve encountered on the net, if you have time:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/10/unlimited-detail-wants-to-kill-3d-cards/
Whats up with these unlimited detail guys? are the talking bs?
March 19th, 2010 at 12:42 am
Unlimited detail: I think they vastly simplify the problem in order to sell their idea
Even if their approach works, they silently ignore all the real problems. I don’t know, like the production pipeline. Do we drop all the triangle-based editors suddenly, and switch to points? How much memory do we need to store a model with “millions of points”? Do we throw away all the work done on antialiasing and mip-mapping? How do we deal with antialiasing with their approach? If the breakthrough is just a search algorithm as the guy claims, why not apply it to triangles? Also, they should play recent some games. We don’t really “see” the triangles anymore, it’s really not the issue anymore. So I don’t think this will go anywhere. That being said I’m definitely not “the smartest graphics guy”, my graphics knowledge is actually rather rusty.