my dell will see the flash drive and recognize it and install it, b/c it pops up with the little messages by the clock saying "new hardware found", "new hardware ready to use". but when i go to my computer or right click on a file the drive is not listed at all. why?

Sometimes the drives are misinstalled as in placed as an unknown device and as such is listed in the device manager. Does the drive show up there? Also you failed to give us a little more detail of the drive ..as in what drive and how big. With that info we would be a lot more help as some manufacturers require a downloadable driver from their web site. Have you tried to find anything about the issue through them? IN THE MATTERS OF STYLE, swim with the current; in matters of principle, STAND LIKE A ROCK

no i haven't thought about going to them, b/c this dell is the only it does it on, all my other computers it works fine, the chip says samsung, 256mb

Here's a problem that kept me occupied for a while... The symptoms were: When a usb flash drive was inserted, it would be detected and make the usual sounds, but would not show up in explorer the "safely remove hardware" window would show the drive, and it could be removed, which would disable the device (operation lights go off) if you rebooted the computer with the drive plugged in, you could see it. Turns out that the problem is due to drive letter designations. The affected machines contained physical (hard and optical) drives c:, d: e: f: g: . Windows will assign the next available letter to the removable drive by default. The problem in this case is that there was already a h: drive present - a mapped network drive. In this case, what was happening was that windows tried to give the thumbdrive the h: drive spot, but failed as it was already taken. Now a smart operating system would just look for the next available letter. XP stops looking after H drive letter so it isn't designated one and thus does not show up like it should. To fix this, you need to go into the windows computer management (right click on my computer, select manage, go to the physical drives section). From there, you can change the drive letters. I'd advised changing the optical drives to letters such as X: and Z:, and giving your thumb drive a letter a: or b. A lot of techs use the higher drive letter designation for almost all their drives so as to not run into similar problems. Hope it works for you. IN THE MATTERS OF STYLE, swim with the current; in matters of principle, STAND LIKE A ROCK