What is U3 doing in My Scandisk Flash Drive?

[Andrzej]

hi there.........

Can anyone explain it to me? I have a ScanDisk flash drive, and it always asks me if I want to keep U3 on this drive, and I always click "I'm not sure, please ask me later" because I keep putting off figuring out what it does. So can anyone enlighten me about how it works and what I can do with it?

Would appreciated your reply..........

[Bon-Z]

U3 is a company producing a proprietary method of auto-launching applications from specially formatted USB flash drives. Flash drives adhering to the U3 specification are termed "U3 smart drives". U3 smart drives come preinstalled with the U3 Launchpad, which looks similar to the Windows OS start menu and controls program installation. The method works with recent Microsoft Windows systems only. Applications which comply with U3 specifications are allowed to write files or registry information to the host computer, but they must remove this information when the flash drive is ejected. Customizations and settings are instead stored with the application on the flash drive.

[Gonzo]

The U3 Launchpad is a Windows program manager that is preinstalled on every U3 smart drive.
The U3 Launchpad automatically starts at insertion of a U3 enabled device.

[Pugsly]

This software automatically attempts installation of U3 components (U3 Launchpad) on the harddisk drive and associated System Registry entries on the Host Computer. Afterwards the U3 software can be taken with all its personalized settings to any computer running a compatible version of Microsoft Windows (though no other operating system), with no need to install the software if not already there, or to use different settings and options, the initialization Host computer requires Administrative privileges and no need for administrator access privileges on subsequent computers.

[Regina]

The original U3 Launchpad could not be uninstalled by an end-user. U3 responded to this criticism by making uninstall software available on their website. This was largely due to Best Buy's Geek Squad, who in early 2006 raised the issue of not being able to uninstall U3 and got them to first write an uninstaller for the Geek Squad branded drives, and later for all the U3 drives. Since November 2006, all U3 drives have included an uninstaller. However, the uninstaller doesn't work in all cases[citation needed]; and requires installing proprietary software on the computer before being able to remove the U3 features from the flash drive[citation needed]. Although U3 removal disables U3 functionality, SanDisk does offer LPInstaller to reinstall the basic U3 feature-set.. Users of non-Microsoft operating systems that do not have access to a Windows PC are unable to remove U3 from their "smart drives". (However U3 would have little effect on non-Windows users because non-Microsoft operating systems cannot run U3, although the U3 software still takes up space and will present a useless read-only drive.) It is possible to use a vmware machine containing windows to uninstall, the uninstall crashes before formatting the drive, but does succeed in removing U3.