If you thought a 5-10% defect rate was high, think again. Most computer devices are getting ever tinier that if a speck of dust gets in, the digital device will not function well. Though the manufacturer will try to use class 100 clean room for their production, you never know some dust could be introduced in their manufacturing process by accident. Looking at some of my digital devices that failure rate seemed fairly consistent at about 5-10% defect rate. This rate feels high and if you are one of the few unlucky ones that tend to get the defective item like my brother-in-law who felt he always get faulty digital devices like digital cameras and such, well there you go, Murphy's Law at work!
So now is a matter of claiming the warranty and since my sis-in-law didn't test it till recently (lapse about a few months), we can't send back to Bonuslink to exchange, instead we have to send it directly to the vendor to claim warranty.
The Bonuslink Kingston vendor contact is different from the Kingston Vendor contact that I got from All IT Digital Mall. Anyway we will just follow the directions of Bonuslink vendor instead since it was them who supplied to Bonuslink:
Hit On Sdn Bhd
No 8, Jalan LP 2A/2,
Taman Lestari Perdana,
43300 Seri Kembangan,
Selangor Darul Ehsan
Phone No : +603-8943 4193
The ALL IT Digital Mall Kingston vendor is:
Able Action
401D, Level4 Tower D, Uptown 5
No. 5 Jalan SS21/39
Damansara Uptown
47400 Petaling Jaya
Tel: 03-7665 3939
Hmm.., looks like there are two Kingston suppliers in the Klang Valley.
[update: 20/1/2012]
Recently I bought some higher capacity USB flash drive, and decided to use my older workhorse SanDisk Cruzer Micro 16GB for my Red Fox MP3 player. Initially I reassigned my Kingston DT Mini 10 for watching HD movies on my Sharp LCD TV. But turned out to be a bad idea. The slimmer connection style of USB-A type, lacking an outer case meant the connection can be rather loose on some USB port. Thus it was very difficult for the LCD TV to detect this Kingston DT Mini 10.
My sis-in-law felt that slim type connection was not so good because:
a) Difficult to figure out which way was the correct way to insert into USB port
b) Even if inserted correctly the USB port has difficulty to detect it as the slim USB-A connector without the casing makes it difficult for the connector to connect to each other
I should think so too, never really quite liked this slim styled USB-A connector, though it did make USB flash drive much smaller than the usual standard flash drives.
So I decided to use this as DT Mini 10 as Readyboost device for my Windows 7 instead. If you plan to totally use the 8GB capacity for readyboost, you should reformat it to NTFS or exFAT, since FAT32 has filesize capacity limit of 4GB max. For me, I decided to keep its original FAT32 format and use the balance 4GB space for file storage.
[update: 15/10/2020]
Finally this Kingston DTmini10 gave up on me. I suppose it wasn't hardy enough to withstand the constant readyboost duty. And of course the poor design of the connector points could also be at fault. After testing it on my other PCs, confirmed that the electronics was fried. Still I was able to use it for about 10 years which was not too bad. As the years went by, USB flash memory gets cheaper and cheaper. Now I have a bunch of them and many of my older and smaller capacity flash drives were relegated to readyboost duty for the older PCs and laptop or used as USB boot drive for Linux, Cloudready Chrome OS live CD / installer. Newer PCs and laptops were blazingly fast and didn't require readyboost to help speed up.
