Have you ever searched forums a night long just to find stupid answers like “Did you restart, check your drive letter, etc.” because any OS would tell you that it cannot write to or format your USB key because the permission was denied? If yes, here’s a solution you may have never thought of:

Check on the physical body of your USB key, maybe there’s a write protection switch turned on. Yes, as SD cards do, some USB keys are uselessly equipped with that hardware feature. And by uselessly, I mean that it causes more problems than it solves them because it can become loose, or you could turn it on by accident.

Yes it’s about XP. It’s old, but a lot of people still use it, and sometimes there’s some stuff that’s really deep in there. So, here’s the story.

At work, I had this very annoying default that every explorer window would open to; that is, with the folders view on. And there was no way to change it. Further more, turning off the folders view made any folder open in another window, with folders view on.

So, here’s how, in case you searched for it:

> Explorer Window > Tools > Folder Options
>  File Types > Folder > Advanced

And set default to open instead of explore.

Right, not too hard, but definitely awkward place for such a setting.