Create bootable Windows USB drives

There are two tools (that I’m aware of and are worth using), one that I use for years and another one that was sent to me by a reader. The reason for these tools is that fast USB drives are usually A LOT faster than DVD drive for installing Widnows. Besides, more and more laptops these days don’t even have optical drives. I had such “problem” with ACER Aspire One years ago and that’s when I started using WinToFlash. And continued to do so with the use of Lexar Lightining II USB drive which is really fast and makes Windows installation a breeze. Lets start…

WinToFlash
This one is the one which I’ve been using for ages. It might look complex at first glance, but it’s actually very simple to use. It is ad supported, so make sure you read screens properly during first startup.

Link: http://wintoflash.com

ZOTAC WinUSB Maker
This one has been sent to me by a reader. It’s a ZOTAC branded program, but doesn’t come with any ads and is also a much better looking program with nice GUI. It’s also made with drag&drop design in mind, so you have to drag all the drives and elements selected to make a bootable USB drive by dragging them inside the GUI window.

Link: http://joshcellsoftwares.com/products/zotacwinusbmaker/

How to spot fake memory cards or USB drives?

There were quite some fake memory cards spotted all around, especially those very cheap ones with massive capacities. There were also quite some problems on Bada Forums where several users had problems using large memory cards in Samsung Wave mobile phone. As it turns out, the memory cards were most probably either fake or defective. And best way to spot that is this tool, called H2testw made by Harald Bögeholz.

H2testw download (v1.4):
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Miscellaneous/H2testw.shtml

Just download the tool, select device to test and set it to test “all available space”. Tool will write data to the drive and later verify the content. If all the data returned is the same as it was written, the drive is good. But if returned data is not the same it can mean that either device is malfunctioning or it’s simply fake (that looks like 32GB, but is in fact only 1GB or even less) and it was just rewriting the data over and over. Was your problematic drive super cheap with massive capacity beyond anything you could get in a verified store? Now you know why.

Tool can verify all sorts of memory cards, USB drives, external or internal HDD drives.