..so in short one can say the usage of FAT is for compatibility and historic reasons, not because it's a good choice. There are other portable & matured filesystems which are robust but a) could not be extorted by patents and b) have to be included in vanilla Windows. (btw: can we say "Window", now that Win 8 jumped on the full-screen apps train too? Or "Fensterl 8" in .AT)