thumb browser testing continues

My plan to usurp the IT authority at work continues. I found yesterday’s setup to be too slow, which I attributed to the fact that the thumb drive in question is likely a USB 1.0 drive (thus slower transfer speeds), and the fact that it was full. Somehow in this unit’s life I managed to reformat it down from 64MB to 32MB, and can’t figure out how to undo that. Grr.

To address both concerns, I dug up my other thumb drive, which is 64MB (and still formatted as such) and is of the USB 2.0 specification as well. My hope was that the better transfer speeds possible (key word there – “possible”) with USB 2.0 would eliminate or drastically reduce the frequent browser freezing that was happening. I’m writing from within Firefox installed on it right now, and I’m still getting the freezing, unfortunately. It’s not quite as bad, and the browser loaded much quicker (but not “fast” by any means), but it’s still not a transparent solution by any means.

There is always the possibility that the computer I have is providing me with only USB 1.0 ports. On one hand, it’s a brand-new computer (as of November last year), but on the other hand it’s pretty much a bargain basement model that was had for less than $1k. I’ve tried to figure out whether the ports are 1.0 or 2.0, but I just can’t seem to find that info.

Now I’m wondering what else I could do. In theory, I could run off an iPod, but that’s still using a USB connection. Using a Firewire drive might be faster, but sadly this particular computer doesn’t have any such ports. Operating directly out of memory with a RAM drive might be speedy, but I won’t even think about going there. Transfer speed seems to be the issue, but even that I’m not sure about; making a game plan is hard when you don’t know the problem. Hmmm… what about burning a CD-ROM with my files? That would only work if I hosted the profile locally, and just had the executable on the CD. If that worked, doing the same thing for the thumb drive might work too.

At this point, I can keep poking around blindly, blatantly go against the “don’t install Firefox” directive, live with the periodic freezing operating from a thumb drive, or live with IE6. Tough call.