Manually ssign a Drive letter to a USB drive
Why?
On this computer, I have been battling the fact that I can't use my iPod or thumb drive on any of the USB ports.

My 1st thought was everything was locked down. However I hear the beep when I plug devices in (front & back ports).

Since this is something I've had to look up I figured I'd post this in the Tutorials section for all Dream In Code members to see.

There are a bunch of drives mapped on this machine, C through J, & then some more latter!
They are mapped using the DOS command net use in a batch file that runs at startup.

The problem is, Windows is auto assigning F: to the USB device, even though it's in use elsewhere!

The solution is to map the USB drive to somewhere else and here's how that's done:

Open an explorer window, and right-click "My Computer", then select "Manage"

On the left-hand side, locate "Storage".
Under that will be "Disk Management"... select that.

This will show your computers drives and partitions.

Locate & right-click the USB drive you have installed, then select "Change Drive Letter and Paths..."

On the dialog box, find & select "Change..." then select your drive letter of choice from the combo box and press OK.

You'll get a warning message, but you can ignore it. Nothing is running off that USB device since it won't map correctly! You are back to the Disk Management dialog now, and your newly selected drive letter is showing for your USB drive. Close this dialog, & you're done.

If you now uninstall the USB drive, and then reinstall it, it will come back up as the same drive letter as you assigned.

A simpler solution is to ensure there is a gap between the letters used to map network drives and the letters of your local drives.

That way any and all USB devices will always be assigned a drive letter correctly.

Or you can just SUBST everything yourself...I love windows.