Hi, I have a Sony Vaio Desktop with windows xp home, 512mb ram, 1.5ghz. and I'm having an issue using a flash drive. I hope I can get some help here. Let me try to explain.
I have a TV that needed a software upgrade. Your'e supposed to download the upgrade to your computer, send it to a flash drive, then plug the fash drive in the TV. My problem is my computer doesn't recognize the flash drive. I've never used one before. I plug the flash drive in the USB ( makes no sound) and there is nothing different in the My Computer window. When I go to Start,My Computer...I have a removable disk ( G ) drive thats alway's there but when I click on it ( with the flash plugged in ) it say's: please insert a disk!!! Is that where it's supposed to be recognized? Any Ideas on how to make it recognize the Flash ?
My computer is 5 year's old and I suspect that may be why. If I can't get it to recognize the flash drive is there possibly a patch I can download that might help? Thanks for your time with this, Herb

   Without knowing more about your computer, I would think the removable disk (G) is for memory sticks for which you should have slots on the front of your computer.  The flash drive will not appear there.
   The flash drive should make its own drive letter.  I would think that the problem is that your drivers for the USB ports is not working.  I have the same problem.  XP comes with these drivers.  Other companies do not have them.  I have not found a way around this.
   If you have an installation CD which came with the Flash drive, I would suggest trying to run that.

You could also try the site of the manufacturer of the drive as some of them do need the driver to be downloaded and installed

Thanks, much appreciated!

Here is a solution that was sent to me:

My problem was similar: I plugged in the flaash drive, and it appeared in the
device manager but not in the folder tree inder My Computer.  It turned out that
the reason was that WIndows tries to assign the flash drive a drive letter that
follows the last hard drive.  In my PC, the second hard drive is D:.  However, I
assigned the next drive letter, E:, to a DVD drive.  The PC was not able to assign
a drive letter to the flash drive.  To fix this, I renamed the other drives so that E:
is not used.  Now the flash drive occupies E: when I plug it in.

Good luck,
Paul Kolodner