azwendyg

Well, that depends on how you buy your designs. Although I'm not familiar with your particular embroidery machine, you probably got some designs with it that are ready to stitch out.

However, most designs you buy or download need to be converted into something your machine can understand and saved to the flash drive that way. That's what the embroider software does for you. That being said, there are other options out there that seem to work well. Years ago I bought a Bernina with an embroidery module and got the included (very cut down version) of their embroidery software with it. That worked for quite awhile because I wasn't designing my own embroidery, just buying and stitching out. That software won't run on new computers, so I had to shop around for something to replace it. I found something for a friend with a new Mac computer and Janome Deco 340 (I think) called "Embrilliance" that runs on both Mac and Windows for less than $150. I got a chance to try it out on her computer and really like it for the money. It does a lot more than my old software and it's relatively easy to use. It has options to write embroidery files out to a flash drive for all kinds of machines, so it's likely it would also work with yours.

Embroidery is a lot of fun, but it's not as easy as they usually make it out to be when you're buying the machine!

Edit: I also wonder if you may have gotten a CD or DVD with some software on it to allow you to write embroidery files to a flash drive with your machine, and they are trying to sell you an upgrade???