Hi, James.
[color=blue]
> after purchasing an external hard drive I can't get the
> 'Safely remove hardware' icon to go away (Not just hide it).[/color]

You can stop that icon from bugging you pretty easily. Run Disk Management
(diskmgmt.msc). Right-click on that Disk in the left-most column of the
Graphical View. Choose Properties, and on the Policies tab, make sure to
choose to Optimize for Quick Removal, rather than for Best Performance.
Note that Quick Removal is the default, but your external HDD installer
might have changed it.

Then, any Writes to that external hard drive will be written to the disk
immediately, rather than transferred first to a cache and written to the HD
later. Thus, you can just "pull the plug" at almost any time without danger
of losing data in the cache that has not yet been written to the HD.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
[email]rc@grandecom.net[/email]
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100

"JamesJ" <jjy@darwin_roadrunner.com> wrote in message
news:eo981nO#JHA.4176@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...[color=blue]
> No. I'm real particular about services and what's not needed. This the
> icon for my
> anti-virus software.
> It's odd. For the last week after purchasing an external hard drive I
> can't get the
> 'Safely remove hardware' icon to go away (Not just hide it). Now an icon I
> want showing
> keeps getting set to 'Hide'.
> I hope Windows 7 has a few enhancements.
>
> James[/color]