This is my first post. Any help would be appreciated.
I use my Kingston USB drive with Portable Apps to run Thunderbird and Firefox.
I{ll use them for a few minutes. Then I have to leave so I quit all appliacations and the Portable Apps application. But I can{t eject the drive yet because data is being written back to the drive. The little LED on the drive blinks for 4 full minutes before Windows says it{s safe to remove it.
It seems like each time I use the drive, it takes a few seconds longer to quit.
I{m in and out of an Internet cafe in Mexico several times a day and this 4 minute wait is unacceptable.
What can I do about this? Is it normal?
There are 300MB free on the drive. The FireFox cache is set to zero. I am using it on computers with Windows XP SP2 (Spanish) and USB 2.0 connection. AVG Pro 7.5 is the virus protection running on these machines, along with PC Tools Spyware Doctor.
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could you move this to off topic forums.
and for the love of god(s) people stop complaining about kingstons!
Note: this is about the 10,000 complaint about kingstons.
(TM)sergentsilerlogo:<(TM(sergentsiler) http://www.sergentsiler.freespaces.com/
Zoop
relax dude. he wasnt complaining about Kingston, he was asking a question about a problem he was having, and simply stated what brand of drive he had. He wanted to provide as much info as possible, hoping it would get a better response. its just like making a request, we need as much info as possible to help out. and I wouldnt call this off topic either.
To the original poster:
Sorry, I'm not sure how to help you out with that issue.
The developer formerly known as ZGitRDun8705
the multiple Kingston complaints and the random nonsense posts do not belong here... even in the off topic forums.
And being rude to new users is simply inexcusable. Please do NOT let any of this happen again. This is not your first warning.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Why do you consider this off-topic?
I{m trying to get Portable Apps to work correctly on my thumb drive. I searched the whole forum looking for relevant posts and found none, so I decided to post here.
Why do you sound so irritated and hostile?
Is there some specific incompatibility with Kingston drives that I should know about? Can you direct me to relevant posts so I can learn about this?
I{m honestly trying to troubleshoot a problem here. Surely it{s not wrong for me to try to do that on this forum.
By the way, last time it took me 5 minutes and 43 seconds to removbe my drive. The problem is getting worse each time.
Sincerely,
Wheat Williams
Adrift in Mexico
You don't happen to have like 2 GB of e-mail on that drive, do you?
My (wild) guess is that what's happenning is this:
You start ThunderbirdPortable.exe
ThunderbirdPortable.exe copies the settings and e-mails from your drive to the usual places in the host
ThunderbirdPortable.exe launches a copy of the "normal" Thunderbird.exe from your drive.
The "normal" Thunderbird.exe uses those settings and e-mails as you work with it, and add's more and more e-mails.
You close the "normal" Thunderbird.exe
ThunderbirdPortable.exe detects this and moves all the settings and the e-mails (more and more of them) back to the drive, then exits.
Windows holds all the info that should be written to the drive in a caché, but tells ThunderbirdPortable.exe that it has been recorded on the drive.
Windows takes 5 min to move all the info from the caché to the drive.
Of course... if you don't really have a lot of e-mails, all this is science fiction.
Another possibility is that something along the way isn't really USB 2 compliant, so the whole lot goes back to behaving "USB 1-ishly" (i.e: Sloooooooow).
Could also be that too much tequila is affecting your drive.
Try keeping it on a michelada diet. 
You have been courteous to me and given me some useful suggestions, so thanks.
However, my Thunderbird account only has about 20 short text emails in it--and about 400 contacts in the address book. I have used the thumb drive on a host that does NOT have Thunderbird on the C drive, and also on a host that DOES have Thunderbird on the C drive, and I notice the same behavior with regard to taking many minutes to remove/eject the drive after all the PortableApps applications are closed.
As far as whether it's USB 1.1 or 2.0, that IS a problem. I'm in an internet cafe in the town of Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico, and some of the computers are recent models and some are quite old. I'm trying to work with the newest, fastest computers I can find, but I have to take whatever machine is available at the time.
K
I'm using Thunderbird, FireFox, KeePass, GAIM, and AbiWord. It's a 512MB Kingston USB drive with about 300MB free.
This problem is CUMULATIVE. Each time I use the thumb drive, it takes more seconds to eject.
The thumb drive is formatted FAT 16. I have tried defragging it with the Windows XP defrag utility. This does not seem to help.
I wish I could test my setup with other brands of thumb drive, but I'm in a third-world country and I don't know where to go for affordable drives. What brands of drive work best with PortableApps.com?
Thank you,
Wheat Williams
USB 1.1 is *deathly* slow with just about everything. If you're stuck with it, you're stuck with it. And there's nothing much you can do. Well over a minute for Firefox or Thunderbird is the norm with USB 1.1. It's all but unusable.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I, too, have the same problem. I run mine off an iPod Nano and have noticed it seems to take an excessive amount of time to be able to eject. Perhaps it is a specific application that is causing the problem.
I am running (on a regular basis):
Convey Portable
Firefox
Thunderbird
Portable Putty
Wheat, what programs are you usually running?
ill lay off! and he is complaining about how his KINGSTON drive takes a long time to eject. srry for the inconvenience.
(TM)sergentsilerlogo:<(TM(sergentsiler) http://www.sergentsiler.freespaces.com/
Zoop
He was not complaining about a Kingston. He was wondering why. Read the other posts. Tracon has the same problem with a iPod Nano.
"There is a tendency for the world to say to America, 'the big problems of the world are yours, you go and sort them out,' and then to worry when America wants to sort them out.
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"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rick Cook
I´m not a programmer, but could this be some sort of memory leak or garbage collection problem in Portable Apps or one of the Portable Edition applications?
I backed up my PortableApps drive, reformatted it as FAT32 (NTFS is not an option) and restored everything.
Now when I go to use my thumb drive, the time it takes to unload is short, but it continues to grow longer with each use. Here we go again...
Same here, on my Sandisk Titaanium (which I am NOT COMPLAINING about) I can only format in Fat32.
But the delay when I click to "removes USB" is sometimes a minute, most times it is just seconds. The usb is doing something, as the light is blinking, but I can't say it if it is a long email or short email or cookie writing or program closing. Seems random, at multiple computers and OS.
"... respect, all good works are not done by only good folk. For here, at the end of all things, we shall do what needs to be done."
Don't be an uberPr∅. They are stinky.
Sorry I haven't checked back in such a long time. Other duties, you know.
If either the computer or the drive are USB 1.1, just like John said, can't be fixed.
So... first, check that your drive is USB 2 and find a computer with USB 2 ports and try there. Only if that isn't OK, suspect the drive.
To buy drives as cheap as possible, you should probably try services such as e-bay or Mexican clones of it. Perhaps De Remate México. (Never used it in México, but in Argentina it works quite OK and you can sometimes get prices that are veeery close to those you would find in the States).
Before you buy anything however, check as a bare minimum that it is USB 2, don't settle for 1.1. And perhaps a visit to Google to check for different transmission speeds/models will also be useful. I think SD cards come in different speeds, so do the hard disks that come inside a USB external casing, but I'm not sure about USB pendrives. So, as said: hit Google. (You're not using a card reader and an SD or Memory Stick, are you?)
Also Portable Freeware lists a Drive Speed Checker to be found here. It might prove useful, but the "More info" link is broken.
And don't give much attention to the claims about Kingston brand pendrives being bad. Perhaps an expert would tell you they are not the best (perhaps, but I, for one, don't know) but they are certainly not ten times slower that all the rest!!!
A faulty pendrive would probably be more prone to losing your data than to just being slow.
I can't really understand why you're getting such hugh differences between FAT and NTFS... Normally you would need to do some benchmarking to really tell which one is faster... Is it possible that the tests with FAT where on one computer (1.1) and the tests with NTFS on another (2.0)?
I have been working with my Kingston drive and PortableApps.com every day for two weeks now. The problem in logging out was revealed when I pulled up Task Manager and looked for processes that had not quit.
When I quit out everything from PortableApps and try to unmount the drive, FireFox is usually still running, and taking up something like 60MB of RAM. Over minutes and seconds, the amount of RAM used by FireFox diminishes and eventually the process quits itself. At this point Windows' "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the System Tray will report that it's safe to unmount the drive.
Here's my solution to the problem. When I'm in a hurry, I quit everything from PortableApps. Then I just pull up the Task Manager and forcibly quit the FireFox process. Since the FireFox cache is set to 0MB anyway, there's not much reason to worry that force quitting would interrupt the writing of anything important back to the PortableApps drive. So far there has been no harm done. So I just force quit FireFox, check with "Safely Remove Hardware" and unplug the drive. Problem solved.