The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Questions & Answers George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au |
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George Skarbek is known to many for his popular help columns in metropolitan newspapers. Each month, George will put together some of the best questions and answers for PC Update readers. |
Stopping USB drives
Question
I have converted both of my USB drives to NTFS (I run XP Professional and
Windows 2000
on my old computer) and things are a lot faster, however disengaging is as often
a problem. After clicking on the icon followed by "Safely Remove Drive E" I am
confronted with the message:
The device 'Generic Volume' cannot be stopped because a program is still
accessing it. The above message never disappears (have waited hours), it never
appeared when the USB's were FAT32.
Answer
There are a couple of actions that you can try. Using Windows Explorer,
right-click on the USB drive, select Properties then click the Hardware tab
which will list all disk drives, so you may have to select the correct one.
Next, click Properties then on the Policies
tab. If "Optimize for performance" is checked, check "Optimize for quick
removal" instead.
If this doesn't help then Norton Utilities "Protected Recycle Bin" may have that
drive open and turning off Norton's protection for that drive can fix this
problem.
Unfortunately it's possible that even after trying both of these options, you
may still see that message. In that case wait at least ten seconds and remove
the drive.
In my opinion you have over 99.8%
probability that there will be no problems or
corruption of any kind on the USB drive.
Many users are not aware that the USB drives should be stopped prior to removal
because the default setting is the quick removal option and they've been just
pulling out the drive after copying to it, without any problem.
Note that it's essential to make sure that the activity LED stops flashing
before you remove that USB drive.
My PC is running very slowly
Question
My PC has recently started running slow. It's slow to start up, seems like it
can only run one application at a time and music sounds like it has bits of
information missing. Also I can't run McAfeeViruscan as my estimate is it would
take at least 2.5 days to complete. I can't find the problem. Any hints would be
appreciated.
Answer
I can't guess what program is causing this but it may be that some background
process is taking up almost all of the CPU. I can give you some guidelines to
track down the likely process.
Assuming that you're running Windows XP, open the Task Manager and click on the
Processes
tab and then you can sort the processes by CPU usage by clicking on the CPU tab.
Observe the name of which process appears
to be the culprit. Then use Google to obtain more
information on that program. For readers who haven't used Task Manager in XP or
Vista, just right-click on the Taskbar or press Alt + Ctrl + Del to select it.
Having determined the process, you should prevent it from starting automatically
when the computer is started, or check for an upgrade if that program is
essential to you. To prevent it from starting, click on Start, Run and enter
MSCONFIG and then click on the Startup tab. MSCONFIG shows all the programs that
start automatically, and my guess is that you don't need most of them so remove
the tick from many of them. This won't uninstall the programs
but just prevents them from starting automatically. You can always start them
manually later.
Knowing just what these programs are can present a problem and you can use a
free program called Startup Inspector. It works similar to the MSCONFIG but has
the added benefit of a key stating which ones are not recommended and should be
removed.
Pressing the Consult button will interrogate a database and give a description
of what the file is and what it's used for. It can be downloaded
from: http://www.windowsstartup.com
Reprinted from the January / February 2008 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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