[quote="namoi"]All this was made to dispose of the green tray arrow which launch the "safely remove hardware" and that i find annoying.
So first is to find a working way to disable this.[/quote]
With your USB drive inserted and recognized by the system, do the following:[ol][li] Right-click on the Taskbar and select Properties from the resulting context menu.[/li]
[li] On the Taskbar tab of the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties page, click the Customize button next to Hide inactive buttons. NOTE: This should work irrespective of the Hide inactive icons option being enabled or disabled.[/li]
[li] On the Customize Notifications dialog, scroll through the items on the list, until you see Safely Remove Hardware. It should be under Current Items.[/li]
[li] Select Safely Remove Hardware and change its Behavior field to Always Hide.[/li]
[li] Click OK to close the Customize Notifications dialog.[/li]
[li] Click Apply on the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog to enforce the changes.[/li]
[li] Click OK to close the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties.[/li][/ol]
I don't think you can get there from here. As far as I'm aware, that is pretty much the way USB devices work on Windows XP.
After you use Safely Remove Hardware, Device Manager will show a physically connected USB device with with this Status:
[quote="Windows XP Device Manager"]Windows cannot use this hardware device because it has been prepared for "safe removal", but it has not been removed from the computer. (Code 47)
To fix this problem, unplug this device from your computer and then plug it in again.[/quote]
Windows XP essentially "reinstalls" a device driver via Plug and Play each time a USB device is attached and "uninstalled" each time it is safely removed. That's not exactly what takes place, but it helps to think of it that way.
Yep i know it's "out of interest"...It's the beauty of it...
more seriously, as i said it's a challenge. I like to know how things work and follow my idees to the end...but true, it's out of interest, except for the Safely remove icon .
For, Kenalcock
I know already that tips for hidding icons...I end with an <<icon instead of a green arrow...Not better.
But Ok, thanks anyway. Maybe it's time to close this topic...I'm feeling that Nudel is thinking the same too ... Or move it to the Coffee section.
It would be useful for putting the system into a safe S3 Standby power state.
Also, Microsoft in their internal and infernal ignorance, always poll certain devices when you do certain task, bringing the damned system to a halt while you are waiting for a drive to spin up or something.
For example, my USB Iomega drive spins down to save the cartridge's useful life and power, when it is not in use. If I click on the Now Playing pull-down in Windows Media Player, while the Rev is spun down, WMP will bring itself to a crawl taking about 2 minutes to read in the contents of the 35 GB REV drive to see if it should play it or not. And of course it shouldn't. So being able to connect and disconnect it with software would help quickly circumvent such issues.
[quote="Naomi"]For, Alcock
I know already that tips for hiding icons...I end with an <<icon instead of a green arrow...Not better.[/quote]
EDIT: I stand corrected on my earlier comment in this post. My other USB device was powered off, and as such was not triggering the Safely Remove Hardware Icon. Once I powered it back on, the icon reappeared. Sorry about that.
The Hide icons chevron button isn't so bad--it allows you to hide lots of icons and make the Notification Area a lot slimmer overall.
"Out of interest" just means I'm asking purely out of curiosity. Maybe it's a local figure of speech.
It can be quite unreliable, though. I turned it off as it kept hiding things I didn't want hidden and showing things I did. I think it recognises programs by their icons and tooltips and gets confused when they change. Hope it's fixed in Vista as it's a very good idea.
I know what you mean about drive spin-down! I've got two external USB Seagate drives which spin-down after 3-5minutes of inactivity. 3-5 minutes! That's rather short but there's no ****ing way to reconfigure them so I'm always waiting while they spin up again, even if I'm not really intending to use them. Ridiculous, and such good drives apart from that. I need to write a program which pings them every minute or so to keep them spun-up, except when the screensaver is showing or something.
It's a great shame that the drive spin-down setting in the Power control panel isn't respected by USB devices. I don't know who is to blame for that but it sucks.
.
... Or move it to the Coffee section.
I turned it off as it kept hiding things I didn't want hidden and showing things I did. I think it recognises programs by their icons and tooltips and gets confused when they change. Hope it's fixed in Vista as it's a very good idea.