Why FAT Doesnt Belong In Your Flash Drives

I have been moving all my wifes applications over from her Windows XP desktop to a Windows 7 notebook.  One of the applications that she uses regularly is OpenLP, which is an open source presentation management system intended for church worship services.  We needed to export the song library that she has built over the years.  Some of them songs are not in the default library because they are new; some are there because they are songs that she has written.  OpenLP has an export facility, and it exported in XML format.  When I tried to copy all these XML files to a flash drive, it kept refusing to do so -- complaining that the file or directory name could not be created. 

Okay, I started to see a pattern: filenames with periods in them.  But some did not fit that pattern at all.  However, I was able to copy the files over the network from the desktop to the new notebook without trouble, and then import them into OpenLP.  Why?

I am guessing that it is because FAT32 (which is what the flash drive that I picked up off the coffee table used) has some filename limitation that is generally the case over our network.  I have not tried this on an NTFS flash drive, but I suspect that the problem would go away.

The more time that I spent with this Toshiba Portege R500, the more impressed I am with what a marvelous combination of size and speed it provides.  Compared to a tablet, it is just a little larger, and just a little heavier -- and for $100, it is hard to argue against it.

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