We've been getting a lot of little flash drives to look at in the past year or so, and every time we see a new one it costs less and does more. The trend is clear.

   When SanDisk came out with a 1 gigabyte capacity flash drive a few years ago it had a list price of nearly a thousand dollars. The drives were sometimes called thumb drives then and were quite the little wonders. Now you can buy a 1 gigabyte flash drive for $10, and people dangle them on their key chains like lucky charms.

   We have a new one from US Modular (USmodular.com) that has a built-in flashlight and ballpoint pen, and it sells for only $20. They call it the Handy Drive. There's a 4 gigabyte model coming out for just a little more.

   A flash drive is a set of memory chips that retain their information even when removed from a battery or computer. SanDisk (SanDisk.com) invented these things, but it's everybody's ball game now. A recent report informed us that giant chip-maker Intel was going into the business and moving to make hard disk drives a technological curiosity. New laptops, we're reliably informed, will sport 500 gigabyte flash memory drives.

   Unlike hard disk drives, flash drives have no moving parts, they have shock resistance as high as 1,000 times the force of Earth's gravity, and a power demand that wouldn't tax a triple-A battery. We will begin to see these things in almost every electrical product made. A few years down the road, some kid will ask, "What's a hard drive, Daddy?"

A New Powerpoint

   There's a new version of PowerPoint available, the first in four years. You can get it on its own for $200 or as part of the new Office 2007 that sells for $300 to $400 from discounters. Either way, you must have the new Vista operating system to use it.

   Heaven only knows how many zillion PowerPoint presentations have been created and shown in countless meetings over the past four years. We have been held prisoner in many of these ourselves. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp., once remarked that when he banned PowerPoint presentations at his company, productivity went up 20 percent. Of course, Ellison has a long history of sniping at Microsoft, so we needn't take that shot too seriously.

   But there's no question people do tend to go nuts with PowerPoint, and the new version gives them more reasons to do so. Instead of the usual look-alike templates, slide-by-slide, you can start with a theme that provides a uniform look for all the slides. Once you design the opening slide, you see a ribbon of choices for others that complement the design and color scheme of the first. When you move the cursor over the choices in the ribbon, you see a preview of what the next slide will look like. As before, you can add music, animation and organizational charts.

All Right, That's Far Enough