Copy & paste in a flash

Written by Larry Schneider
Thursday, 15 October 2009 00:00

Dear Larry,

I bought myself one of those little keychain UBS (sic) drives for my PC. So what do I do with it exactly? — F.P.

Dear F.P.,

What you’re actually referring to is a USB drive, which stands for Universal Serial Bus as opposed to UBS, the bank. These little pocket drives — also referred to as flash drives or thumb drives — vary in size from one gigabyte to 32 and beyond. For most people, four to eight should be plenty these days.

The USB drive acts just like another disk drive in your computer. Therefore, like your PC’s other storage devices, it’ll be assigned a letter of the alphabet. If you want to see which letter, open My Computer before you insert the USB drive. You should see it show up in a moment as another storage device, and its letter will appear next to whatever the name of the device happens to be. (If you want, you can right-click the drive and click Rename to give it a name you’ll remember — like JOEUSB.) Depending on your computer, a window displaying the contents of the drive may also appear when you connect it to your computer. If not, click its drive icon in My Computer, and its window will appear on your desktop.

So let’s say you want to copy some of your documents to the drive. Open your Documents, and locate which files and/or folders you want to copy. Hold down the Ctrl key, and click each one, then tell the computer you want to copy them by either pressing Ctrl+C, clicking Edit, Copy in the menu bar if it’s visible, or right-click any one of the files you highlighted and left-click Copy.

Now return to the USB drive window. Paste the files you copied earlier using one of these methods: Press Ctrl+V, click Edit, Paste in the menu bar, or right-click the white space in the USB drive window, then left-click Paste. Voilà!

If you want to copy files from the USB drive back to your computer, just reverse the procedure. In any event, remember this: If you’re pasting a file or folder that already exists, Windows will warn you, asking if you’re sure you want to overwrite it. Whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of copying an older file on top of a newer one — unless you really want to.

When you’re ready to remove the USB drive, the safest method is to click the Safely Remove Hardware icon in your system tray first .

This is Larry Schneider, logging off.

Larry Schneider is the owner of Greenwich-based computer consulting firm Accent on Computers. Call 625-7575 or visit Accentoncomputers.com for more information or send an e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .