“What are jump drives and how do you use them?”
Jump Drives which are also know as flash drives, or thumb drives are the easiest way to transfer files and take it with you wherever you go or to transfer files from one computer to the next. Jump drives are also bloody cheap these days and they come in all different capacities from 256 MB to 32GB and the portable drives are getting larger in storage size constantly. The common USB flash drive sizes are 1 GB, 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB, the biggest memory size I’ve seen so far is 32GB.
How to Use a Jump Drive aka. Flash Drive aka. Thumb Drive
Take the Jump drive and plug that into your computer USB port. What is a USB port you ask, all computers come with a least 2 USB ports on a computer or laptop. On a computer tower the USB ports can be in the back and in the front, and on a laptop they can be anywhere on the side or the back.
USB Port on a Laptop
USB ports on the back of a computer tower
Once you have the jump drive plugged into the USB port a window may automatically open and if that’s the case just click on the “Open Folder to view Files”
If nothing happens when you plug the usb thumb drive in then you can manually select it by going to Start > Computer and from there you should see the USB jump drive which has been assigned a drive letter and Windows should recognize it as a removable storage device.
Now all you need to do is click on the drive icon to open the explorer window and start putting in whatever files you want by dragging and dropping, or by copying and pasting. You can also delete files as you wish. The USB drive is just like a regular desktop folder because you can add files, create new folders, delete files and folders. The only limit you have is the size of the drive. You can check the amount of space available by right clicking while you’re in the USB Jump drive and scroll down to “Properties” to see the amount of memory remaining.