Buried among Windows Vista's many annoyances is a handy feature to speed up your system called ReadyBoost. It allows you to store commonly used files in a flash memory drive or SD card. The computer can retrieve these files more quickly than from the hard-drive and, as a bonus, you constantly create a backup of important data. Here's how to do it according to the good people at How to Geek:

"Turning this feature on couldn't be simpler. Just stick the flash drive, SD card, or whatever flash device you want into your computer. You'll see this dialog pop up:

"Click the 'Speed up my system' link, and you'll be taken to the ReadyBoost panel for the flash drive:

 "Just select 'Use this device', and set the amount of space you want to use. Windows will create what is essentially a paging file on the disk, and will use it for faster access.

"Note that this will only work with USB 2.0 devices or SD cards."

Source

Sharing a flash drive these days is like sharing a soda - everyone does it, nobody thinks twice, and someone inevitably ends up with Mono. Viruses can latch onto flash drives to transfer themselves to other computers. To see if your computer is infected with a flash drive virus, here's what you do:

1. Insert a clean flash drive that you"re fairly certain doesn't have anything nasty on it.
2. On a PC, go the Start button, then the Accessories menu, then click on Command Prompt
3. Type in "type autorun.inf" and press Enter
4. If you see something like what's pictured below, then you have a virus:

5. If you do have a virus, it's time to run a virus-scan of your whole computer. For this purpose you can use free software like ad aware AVG (thanks for the suggestion coffee-eyes!)

If you want to prevent such infections in the future, click here for more info (scroll down to #4)