saftly remove hardware

[mwr1550]

I recently bought a new printer. A Hewlet Packard hp psc 2210 all-in-one. I got it set up ok and things seem to work fine, however... (theres always one of those isn't there) I am now getting an icon in my taskbar that says I can saftly remove hardware. When I click on it it shows two items; saftly remove usb mass storage device - drive(G),
and saftly remove psc 2200 (dot4usb)
The one I recognise as probably being my printer, the other, the usb mass storage device, I don't know what that refers to. My question is this Should I remove either or both? and if not how do I get rid of the icon in the taskbar? And Why is it there in the first place?

I am running windows xp pro on a amd duron 900 mhz processor

PS, Apparently while typing this post I removed the usb mass storage device with out realizing it. With no ill effects so far.

[mwr1550]

Pardon the spelling, that should read safely not saftly. DOH!

[kayofcircles]

I don't have XP, so a bit hampered here by ignorance. I would think you'd want to check msconfig and see if HP has something turning on in there, but you'll need to wait for someone with XP for instructions on that...and maybe with USB, will have to leave it anyway. You might want to go and check out HP's help site.. HP printers (http://www.hp.com/cposupport/nonjsnav/prhome.html) ..although I just browsed a bit in there and don't see anything helpful, but I am not sure which model exactly you have..there are two 2210 models.

Just did a Google, and only found an explanation for Linux, but apparently mass storage devices are things like digital cameras and external storage type things. Since you have an "all in one"..yours is probably for transferring digital camera pics to your all in one.

I doubt if you want to safely remove a printer you just installed. If you're talking about the Quick Launch bar, you can right click on an empty area in the Quick Launch and you'll see the icons included in the folder. Make sure that the ones you're talking about are "shortcuts" by right clicking on them and choosing Properties, but if they are shortcuts, just delete them.

[Steve]

mwr1550,

This is for use with external devices such as pc cards on laptops, usb external hard drives or digital cameras. It stops the hardware device so that you can disconnect it. e.g. - if you have an external usb hard drive and have write-caching enabled, just unplugging the device without stopping it could result in data loss if the cached versions of files have not been written to the disk yet.

Usually there is no problem with neglecting to stop a hot-swappable device before unplugging it, but it is always best to do so.

Hope that helps...:)

[ErnieK]

As Steve said it is for the card/memory from your camera etc. This loads in XP as another drive.

Unless you can disable it, (which is unlikly, as I assume your all in one has built in memory reader) you will have to put up with it.

Or you could try going into device manager and disabling from there. I think you would right click on the "Drive" and select disable.

[Paul Komski]

Have only really noticed these prompts relating to usb devices when using xp.

It's usually been self-evident that either the device has been removed or its power supply turned off etc since the last time xp was running with the device working.

Conversely, reinserting a device (say a slave drive) will often generate a new hardware detected prompt.

I think of these as just information prompts and as long as the devices were installed properly (or that xp has the drivers in its bank) then they seem to be one-off events that don't recur if you were to reboot, without changing the current hardare configuration.

[david eaton]

This is somewhere between a guess and a vague memory, but does that particular all-in one have a card reader included so that digital camera cards can be printed directly? I have seen that on one of the HP combinations, but cannot remember the model number.

If it is included, it accounts for the removeable mass storage device you found. If you intend to use the reader, the driver will be needed.

David