next to my clock a new icon has started running caled "safely remove hardware". I have no hardware I would like to remove, and have tried removing startup items with msconfig. Any suggestions on how to remove it?
That's for pen drives and other such P&P devices. It will stay there until you want to remove the device, It doesn't like it if you simply unplug some devices wthout telling it about it first. It doesn't take up any system resources, so it's only a problem visualy... The solution is to upgrade to XP, which doesn't need that feature...
On laptops, any device that plugs into the PCMCIA slot. On Desktops, any USB device can cause that icon to appear. The true purpose is to allow you to "gracefully" turn off the device before you unplug it. Most of the time, doesn't matter but Windows would prefer you to stop the device then remove it.
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Other such devices include digital cameras, webcams, joysticks or gamepads, sometimes even certain USB hubs, etc...