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Volume I:Issue II, Spring 2006 Published: April 1, 2006 In This Issue: From the Editor: New Print Edition Available! Developing For Fun With OS/2 And OpenWatcom --Axel Meiss Surfing In The Colorful Chinese World With OS/2 And eComStation --Chen Biao USB Thumb Drives And Flash Wristbands With eComStation --Tom Mullins Power Tips Gallery-Desktop Backgrounds Want to write for OS2eCS eZine-Learn how! |
 
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USB Thumb Drives And Flash Wristbands With eComStation -By Tom Mullins This article is about my experience with USB Thumb Drives and eComStation. I have been looking for a replacement for the vulnerable 1.44 MB floppy diskette. I have discovered USB Thumb drives. I believe these could be a better alternative than floppy diskettes. They are faster and hold more data than diskettes. Fortunately eComStation has pretty good support for USB mass storage drives. For my tests, I am using an IBM Thinkpad T23. The T23 enables easy access to reach the USB ports. It is running eComStation v1.1 (http://www.ecomstation.com). I have installed the latest USB drivers from the eComStation site; both the basic (v10.162 dated 01-21-2006) and the mass storage drivers (v10.162 dated 01-21-2006). AIso for my tests I'm using a Gateway 200S notebook computer. Its running WinXP-home edition. (http://www.gateway.com.) The following USB devices that I will test with eComStation are: a USB drive I aquired at work, an Imation Flash Wristband I bought at Target (http://www.target.com), and a USB007 mini drive I ordered. The first USB device, the USB drive from work is made by Dell (http://www.dell.com) It came with the computers we use at work. It is 64 megabytes in size. When connected to the Thinkpad, eComStation is able to see the drive. I was able to upload files to it. I then connected it to my Gateway 200S notebook computer runing Windows XP and was able to sucessfuly download the files to it. This demonstrated a working solution to transfer files between eComStation and Windows Laptops. The downside with the Windows machine is that it saw the files, but the names were truncated. I then downloaded files from the Windows based Gateway to the USB Drive. Upon connecting the USB Drive to my Thinkpad running eComStation, the files were recognized without any truncation. [Editors Note: If you like truncated files-use Windows, if you want untruncated filenames-use eComStation!]  The Imation Flash Wristband I bought at Target was $25 for 256 megabytes of memory. It was recognized by eComStation upon pluging it in. So I then formatted it using FAT. I can upload files to it from the Thinkpad with eComStation, but Windows XP running on the Gateway is unable to see them. However if I upload files to it from the Gateway, they are not seen on the Thinkpad. It seems to work great for transfering files from an eComStation PC to a Windows PC. One other thing I discovered with the Imation Flash Wristbands is that you can get them with custom printing. Being that they work with eComStation, it would be neat to have them printed with an OS/2 or eComStation logo. Of course you can have most any photo imprinted on them: (http://www.branded-promotions.com/GeneralInfo/GeneralInfo.aspx?DPSV_Id=230374 ).  The USB007 mini USB drive (http://www.usb007.com) I ordered, holds 512 megabytes of memory. I have not been able to get it to be recognized by eComStation yet. I had installed the latest USB drivers as I noted above. The Gateway PC running Windows XP is able to upload data to the drive. I have tried using the USB resource program in eComStation, but it does not detect the device. I am still working to get it to work. One of the reasons I bought the drive is that you can get it with custom printing (http://www.usb007.com/corporategift.htm). I will try a smaller drive (in memory, not size) to see if it will work with eComStation. If you have any experience with USB devices and eComStation (or OS/2 Warp), I would like to hear from you and use the information in a future article. My e-mail address is bigwarpguy NOSPAM AT os2ecs DOT org . A great place for information on USB drives and other eComStation compatible hardware is OS/2 Warp Be (http://www.os2warp.be). I have used OS/2 Warp since version 3. I have upgraded all my OS/2 comptuers to eComStation 1.1 and will purchase and install eComStation v2.0 when it comes out. Tom Mullins is a long time user of OS/2 since OS/2 Warp v3. He serves as Director of Marketing for the OS2eCS Organization.  | |