Finally hooked up the USB hub on my Dell 1907 FP. While I’ve seen many people complain about side mounted USB ports (or maybe it was because some monitors only had these ports) I found them very useful for quick, temporary USB connections. The two ports on the back seem right for more permanent connections that one doesn’t have to change very often, if ever.
I’ve been getting a lot of use out of my SanDisk Micro Cruzer USB key since I put it on my keychain. I always needed to have one of these with me in case I needed to copy something or have some software with me. This particular model has a tough gel covering around the key, and the part that hooks on a keyring is completely gel. Only problem is that I found 2 GB isn’t enough space anymore. I haven’t found any more spacious keys of this particular type yet, so I added my SanDisk Cruzer Micro U3 key also to my key chain. So far it hasn’t been too crowded. This one has a plastic covering, though, with a metal ring that goes over your keyring.
Had another encounter with DEP last night. I was trying to install the CD that came with my new Moto Q (more on this soon) on my Vista machine, but DEP didn’t like setup.exe on the CD. I tried a few different things, but finally had to completely disable DEP to install the software. My encounters with DEP have been ridiculous, and instead of protecting me from some threat, have only irritated me by preventing me from installing legitimate software. I am now 0 for 2 with DEP and recommend disabling it if you run into problems installing normal software and cannot overcome these problems within DEP’s configuration in Windows.