If you have a memory card reader connected to the computer (which come as standard in many monitors) you probably know the feeling of having about six additional drives in the Computer folder taking up space, even when the memory card slot is empty. Fortunately, Windows 7 can resolve this problem with a new setting. Open the Computer folder (formerly known as My Computer in Windows XP) and press the ALT key (to reveal the top menu bar) and go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options”. In the Folder Options window, click the “View” tab and enable the setting “Hide empty drives in the Computer folder”. Click OK and now drives which have no media will be hidden in the Computer folder until they have media in the drive.

Recently I noticed that the hard drive activity light on my HP notebook computer (running Windows Vista) is constantly flickering. This new behaviour (which has not happened during the past two years of owning this computer) does not seem to affect performance but I am puzzled about the cause. I suspect some kind of indexing or scanning process has been surreptitiously introduced but don’t know how to track it down. Similar hard drive activity occurs when I run the regular virus scan but what I’ve got now happens all the time. My research using the internet has revealed a number of possible causes, none of which seem relevant to my situation. One item I came across suggested that it is possible to detect which process is causing the non-stop hard drive activity but there were no details provided as to how this is achieved. I gather it is a matter of using Task Manager but I have not been able to figure out how. Do you have any suggestions? (more…)