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Vance Hunt
has provided home-user help desk style support for his consulting company for over 6 years. Making his home in beautiful Southern California, Vance provides general computer Q&A for users via his weekly column.
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 | Friday, July 14, 2006 |
| U3: U-go! Plus - what's in a name? |
| By Vance Hunt |
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I got a USB keychain drive, and it came with U3. I hate this layer, but can't get rid of it. Know any ways to kill it?
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U3 is a proprietary application design specification created for Windows
2000/XP/2003 that allows applications to be executed and run completely
and directly from a specially formatted USB flash drive, run like normal apps,
storing all user-specific information on the USB drive itself so that no matter
what computer you plug the USB drive into, your apps are available and work like
you expect them to.
Biggest complaint about U3 I hear is that it loads slowly, is very picky
about how you remove the USB drive, and takes up too much space on the drive.
Personally, I can't weight in on the subject as I have no U3 devices.
Why do I have no U3 devices? Because I (as well as many others) remove
the U3 layer as soon as the USB device comes out of the packaging. How?
Formatting won't work - the U3 software will automatically re-install the next
time you connect the device. To remove it,
get the uninstall utility
from the U3 folks themselves. You don't need to identify yourself, and
you don't need to fill out the form they present. Word to the wise -
backup your data first as the uninstall will completely remove all data from the
drive.
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I want to know the names of all the DLLs used in winmgmts or WMI. How can I find this?
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This might not be as straightforward as you think; DLL files used by the WMI
subsystem can vary depending on platform and purpose (Win. 9x, NT4, => 2000, and
Decoupled Provider). The Decoupled Provider, for instance, uses only two
DLLs whereas a count of DLLs just in the primary WMI subfolder on an XP SP2
computer is 50.
If you are looking to research files for the Decoupled Provider, try opening
the
WMI Decoupled Provider merge module or the stand-alone
WMI Decoupled Provider Redistributable Components and evaluate their
contents, either by using an MSI editor to review the merge module, or a
snapshot utility to capture changes made by the stand-alone installer.
For Windows 9x and NT4, you can start by looking at the
WMI Core 1.5 download. Again, decompile or snapshot changes made to a
system to determine all the information you need.
For 2000 / XP / 2003, WMI is already installed. %WinDir%\System32\WBEM
is the host directory, and a lot of the information you are looking for can be
found there.
In any case, you can also find information within the WMI
SDK, available from Microsoft as a component of their larger platform SDK
install.
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