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Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time in Explorer, copying multiple CDs and DVDs to a hard drive. When I ejected a disc, Explorer tries to select the following letter after the CD/DVD drive. This causes an error on my computer as the next drive is a multiformat card reader with no media in it. Usually this is not a problem and I just click “OK” and continue on my way, but I have 400 discs to copy and the thought of clicking “OK” 400 times is not my idea of fun.

There is a fix however! Hide the drives. This way, Explorer won’t pop up the error because it can’t see the drive. This may not work for everyone, but it does for me. I rarely use the media reader so it is more convenient for me to just unhide the drives again when I’m finished with my disc copying.

Thanks to http://www.pcdrome.com where I found the following tweak:

Open your registry and find or create the key below.

The “NoDrives” value uses a 32-bit word to define local and network drive visibility for each logical drive in the computer. The lower 26 bits of the 32-bit word correspond to drive letters A through Z. Drives are visible when set to 0 and hidden when set to 1.

If you are not happy working in Hex, add these decimal numbers to hide the drive(s):

A: 1, B: 2, C: 4, D: 8, E: 16, F: 32, G: 64, H: 128, I: 256, J: 512, K: 1024, L: 2048, M: 4096, N: 8192, O: 16384, P: 32768, Q: 65536, R: 131072, S: 262144, T: 524288, U: 1048576, V: 2097152, W: 4194304, X: 8388608, Y: 16777216, Z: 33554432, ALL: 67108863

For example to hide drive A and drive D, you would add 1 (A) + 8 (D) which means the value should be set to “9″.

To disable all the drives set the value to “67108863″.

Restart Windows for the change to take effect.

Windows XP Task Manager (where Normal doesn’t mean default)

I only just noticed this the other day when I was trying to resolve another unrelated problem. I was using Task Manager to keep an eye on my CPU usage which spiked to 100% usage every 120 seconds or so.

The default behaviour of Task Manager is to update once every second, and if you check the Update Speed option in the menu, “Normal” is already selected. That would lead you to believe that “Normal” is 1 second (High is every 0.5 seconds and Low is every 4 seconds).  The problem is, if you ever select anything in this menu – be it High, Normal, Low, or Paused – “Normal” will set the update interval to two seconds. It is impossible to get back to the default (and most useful) update interval of one second.  Simply, it’s bugged.

To get back to the default behaviour, you need to:

• Open Regedit.exe
• Browse to
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\TaskManager
• Delete the string Preferences
• Restart Task Manager

You will then have the default behavior of having an update interval of one second.  Thanks to Trogdor on the Firing Squad forums for finding this solution.