Annoyance of USB-sticks.

Today my USB stick accidently ended up in the washing machine (probably for the 17th time now)

Usually it works perfectly afterwards, and has a nice smell too.

But today something weird happend, it somehow downgraded to USB 1.1 since it only works when I plug it in my G15 keyboard (which is 1.1) but whenever I plug it into a 2.0 drive I get the annoying "USB Device Not Recognized" message. The little led thingy on my USB stick still works for a second but stops after the error message pops up.

A friend of mine told me to download and manually install the drivers of my USB stick but TwinMOS only has drivers for Windows 95.

Is there anyway I can get my usb stick to work on 2.0 again?

Flash memory is an odd creature. Typically, if this is happening, it is time to get a new one. Thankfully, they are dirt cheap these days, and come in huge sizes. Always make sure it is completely dry before you use it again. Water can't hurt flash memory provided it isn't wet when electricity flows through it. If it is wet, it short circuits. That seems to be the case here, unfortunately.

Yeah, I guess after 17 times in the washer it would probably not like it anymore.. but who knows. I'm not sure of any way to fix this though, never dealt with it myself.

If you have Vista, they have a thing called ''Ready-Boost'' apparently, if you buy like a 4 gig Flash drive you can turn on ready-boost and it adds more memory to your system for some performance boost (but not sure if it really boosts performance).

Minimally, if you have low memory in your computer to start with. Us power users with 4GB and more should steer well clear - if anything, Ready-Boost will slow down a high-end system.

Yeah I could imagine, 4 gigs of physical ram in the computer is way-a-plenty, I wouldn't be worrying about anything in that regard. I was just throwing it out there.

I don't know if flash drives can have firmware on them, can they? May be a daft question, but flashing a firmware to it *might* help if it was possible.

Remove drivers, reinstall drivers. You can also try reformatting it. But as Rahja said it most likely fried something.