Lena said that her office always shuts off the air-con after office hours and the environment gets a little warm afterwards. Perhaps this little nifty little gadget might help some. It is a USB powered fan. Really cheapo! Going for RM8.80 as sold in All IT computer store.

It sounded like a good idea at that time, but I guess as any cheapo products there might be a downside to it. I brought it back to my office to give it a spin. The USB fan works indeed. The blade spins quietly and I could feel some breeze from the small blades cutting through the air. As far as it goes, it is mechanically working.

But, there is always a “but”, my Windows Vista started to go crazy. It tried to detect a hardware, but what is there to detect? It just needed the USB for power. And there it went trying to determine what hardware was plugged into the USB socket. Eventually it said unknown device found. Surely la…

And it didn’t end there. It would have been fine if it just said unknown hardware and no device driver found and left it as that. It brought down all my USB socket and cause my other USB device to not function.

Perhaps this problem was only for my Dell Vostro 200 PC running on Windows Vista. Hopefully, when I test it at home it would be better. Will see.

== update 17-03-2009 ==

Tested it out at home. No problem with my Gigabyte PC and Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop. Must be Dell Vostro 200 being a little buggy. I notice the Dell Vostro 200 has this hardware crashes problem. Must be its hardware recognition bug. Hmmm…