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DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A
May 7, 2006
A little Nostalgia
For a glimpse of the Computing future as
seen in 1954, click
HERE.
For the State-Of-The-Art computer in 1989,
click
HERE.
Q.
I recently added another CD drive to my
computer but the drive letter automatically
assigned to it isn't what I want. Can I
change the drive letter to something else?
A.
If you are running Windows XP, you can
easily change the drive letter of any drive,
a hard drive, CD, removable drive, etc., to
any unused letter in the alphabet. It is not
advisable to change the C drive, since it is
the boot drive, and there are certain other
risks changing other hard drive letters.
However, changing a CD drive letter should
not pose any problems.
Click
Start, then Run, and enter compmgmt.msc, and
click OK. This will open the Windows
Computer Management dialog. Expand the
window to full screen size to better see
what it contains. In the left pane you will
see an item called Storage, and under it
there is one called Disk Management. Click
on it. On the top pain on the right is a
list of your active drives, and on the
bottom right is a graphic representation of
all the drives in your computer.
If you
have one physical hard drive it will be
listed first and is called Disk 0. In most
of our normal lives, 0 (zero) means
"nothing", but to a computer it is a viable
number, and very important. In this case,
Disk 0 is the the most important one in your
computer as it usually is the one your C
drive is located on.
If disk 0
is partitioned into logical drives, they
will be listed on the same line. If you have
another physical hard drive, it will be
listed next, and designated as Disk 1. Below
these are listed your CD drives, and another
drives like a Zip drive, or USB jump drive
are listed.
NOTE:
Floppy drives are not listed here and their
drive letters are pre-designated as either A
or B. This designation is determined by the
ribbon cable that attaches them to the
motherboard, and cannot be changed
otherwise.
There is
other information about the drive shown here
too. For the hard drives, their name, size,
letter, file system type, and condition.
There are many different conditions of your
drive's health, too many to cover here, but
if your drive is reported as anything but
Healthy, you can visit
this site
and click on "Disk and Volume Status
Descriptions" to find what the reported
health means.
Find
the CD that you want to change the drive
letter, and right click on it, and choose
Change Drive Letter. Click the Change
button, and the scroll arrow by the current
drive letter. A list of all the available
unused letters will be listed. Pick whatever
letter you want, and click OK. When
you click on OK to change the drive letter,
you will be presented with a Confirmation
dialog like this:
You have
to choose Yes and the drive letter will be
changed. Of course, you can always change it
back should you decided to do so latter.
If
another drive already has the letter you
want you will have to change it to something
else first.
Q.
The Icons in the lower right tray keep
disappearing so I cannot see what is there.
How can I make them stay visible?
A.
This is something that is done by default
what Windows XP is installed, and it a bone
of contention with me. To me it is just
another way Microsoft is trying to tell me
that I am not smart enough to know what's
there so it tries to hide it from me. Well,
I do want to know all the time what's there,
so I turn this "Feature??" off. It is quite
easy, and here's how to do it.
Right
click on a blank space in the taskbar across
the bottom of the screen, and choose
Properties. Click the Taskbar tab if it is
not already clicked. At the bottom of this
dialog, there is a checkbox in front of
"Hide inactive icons". Uncheck this box, and
then Windows won't hide those icons that you
want to see.
Of
course, if there are some that you really
want Windows to hide, you can pick and
choose which ones that will be always
displayed or hidden.
With the
"Hide inactive icons" box checked, the
Customize button becomes active. Clicking it
will allow you to select the ones you want
to be hidden and always displayed. |
