Let us start with a question that arose while we were testing USB drives: Does anyone know how to turn off the stupid Windows alert that says "This device can perform faster if you connect it to a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 port"?

This is shown when you plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 1.1-compliant port, and it is a really stupid message if you don't, in fact, have a USB 2.0-compliant port, which is something Windows can easily determine.

Another amazingly dumb message we got when we were trying to view an unformatted USB drive with Windows Explorer was "Volume information for this disk cannot be found.'OK.we have no problem with the message so far.but that was followed by'This may happen if the disk is a 1394 or USB device on a Windows 2000 machine."

What this alert really says is that the Microsoft engineers couldn't be bothered to test which operating system they were running on and apparently figured that a generic but useless message would cover enough ground so they could get on to a more interesting project.