Safely remove hardware command

[Eric Hoffman]

Hi, I'm not sure what's going on here with my four year old computer, to be honest I'm not sure what goes on with computers a lot of the time.

Anyway, for the past few weeks the safely remove hardware icon that used to be at the bottom, (the tool bar ?) has dissappeared. If I restart the computer it will sometimes reappear, and sometimes not.

I use this to remove my card reader safely from the computer.

Anybody have any ideas on this ? The computer is a Dell Dimension running XP Home edition with SP2.

Any help or suggestions will be very much appreciated.

Eric

[JDArt]

I have never bothered with this "safely remove" thing. It's a pain, poorly documented, and it's not clear that just unplugging a device causes any harm.

[brian.austin]

Originally Posted by JDArt

I have never bothered with this "safely remove" thing. It's a pain, poorly documented, and it's not clear that just unplugging a device causes any harm.

The only issue I've seen crop up from this is when open files are suddenly disconnected from the computer. The file becomes corrupted or unreadable due to the "open" flag still on the disk/card. As long as the files are not in use during the ejection, you should be fine.

NT4, Windows 2000, and XP pre-SP1 all had issues with hardware removal, regardless of files. It stemmed from Microsoft's poor implementation of Plug-n-Play with the NT kernel. That's since been resolved, though, if you're at XP SP1 or higher.

[Eric Hoffman]

JD and Brian, thanks for taking the time to reply, and putting my mind somewhat more at ease.