I've been trying to figure out how to deal with all of the broken Zip drives and Zip disks that we have been plagued with this year. Flash drives seem to be the answer. Solid state, no moving parts, extreme durability, and a reasonable price all add up to a very cost effective and functional solution.  
 
Last week, on the State of Ohio technology coordinator listserv, someone brought up the topic of flash drives. Another tech coordinator mentioned: 
 
"I found out by experimentation that a flash drive that was started on a typical computer was "given" the mapped drive letter "e". If that same flash drive then was put in a workstation that already had the e drive mapped, it would be detected but would not be given a drive letter." 
 
This has yet to happen on any Macintosh computer that I have ever used. I can have dozens of server volumes auto-mount at login and a flash drive detects just fine when connected to the USB connector. What is even more amazing is the hoops that people seem to jump through just to get functionality in their computers that should have been there when the OS was sold by Microsoft: 
 
"A "typical" computer has a hard drive(c) and a cd-rom drive(d). When you install a flash drive, it looks for the next drive letter, which would be e. However, if you already have a network drive mapped, it will not show up because the network drive was already there before you plugged in the flash drive. What you can do is disconnect the mapped drive, plug in the flash drive, go to disk administrator and change the drive letter to U (for USB) and reconnect the network drive." 
 
While I salute the person who took the time to write down this fix and send it to the listserv, Microsoft needs to fix "oopsies" like this BEFORE they try to sell us an OS that they call, "Windows XP Professional."