Friday, March 13, 2009

New Safely Remove Hardware in W7

The Safely Remove Hardware menu has been adjusted in Windows 7, it seems to be better.

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In previous versions, you could left-click to bring up a menu which listed each device you could remove, or right-click to bring up a dialog box listing more details about each device you could remove. In 7, however they seemed to have dropped the right-click menu, combining the extra details to the menu (either mouse button). (AFIAK).

If you click on the Safely Remove Hardware item, it now brings up a virtual folder (some form of Control Panel item actually).  This could be good if you have many removable devices to choose from, or you want to be able to remove several at the same time.  The only problem is that it’s not really clear how to actually remove a device, given a dedicated screen.  To actually remove a device, you still have to right-click the icon (see the next picture). (Or use the toolbar option, but this is still two clicks.)

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I feel if there’s only one drive attached to the device you want to remove you don’t need a cascading menu, it’s not much more code…

Aside from that though, I’m happy with the change overall.