The extended saga about Windows XP requiring an extraordinarily long time to write bundles of small files to USB removable drives may have come to an end. According to Microsoft, as of 6 July 2004, it is "Working As Designed". You may recall that this started with several contributors to the Compuserve PCHardware forum, including Judith Miner, Roy Longbottom and Dan Landiss, noticing that writing several small files to a USB flash RAM is multiple times slower than writing the same number of bytes in a single file. One might reasonably expect some slowdown, but the ratio is as much as 50:1. FAT32 is slower than FAT16, and the slowdown seemed to be proportional to drive capacity.