Hi one and all, I am new to this forum and rubbish with a computer, so expect some pretty basic questions in the future! I installed the full suite on my usb drive a few days ago and think it's great, so all works fine but two questions, should the menu icon be one the taskbar even when usb is not connected and is the X at the bottom right of the menu there to close it. Every time I try to "safely remove" a message tells me the drive is still in use. Any advice would be helpful but keep it in simple terms! My OS is XP Pro. Thanks in advance.
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the menu icon is what you click to make the menu show up, so if the menu is unplugged it shouldn't be there. the x at the bottom is for closing, but only the menu. to safely remove the drive, you need to close all the other apps as well (that are on your flash drive). Or you can use an ejectscript to close them for you.
P.S. You can find this anytime because it's in the support part of this site.
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Thanks digitxp, just wanted to make sure I was not doing something wrong. doubtless I,ll be back with more basic questions again.
When you want to eject the drive, make sure you have closed things. Closing things in reverse order of how you opened them is best (though not always required absolutely). For example, if you opened Thunderbird Portable and Firefox Portable from the menu, you should close both of them down, then close down the menu. You may also need to close down some other things, like "My Computer" (Explorer) windows that are open showing your removable drive.
In general, if the task bar and notification tray (the thing near the clock) don't have icons showing up, you've closed everything down that you have control over, and can then try the "safely remove hardware" function. (Yes, that is an icon in the notification tray; you can probably figure out that that would be the last thing to use after closing the others. There may also be some tray icons, like anti-virus and networking, that shouldn't be closed; you may need to experiment with them and learn which ones keep the removable drive "in use" and which ones do not.)
Finally, there are times when windows explorer (and some other programs) keep the drive in use, even when all the obvious windows and task bar and tray icons are closed (this is a fault of windows, not you). So if you have used Alt-Tab and checked twice for open programs and it still won't say it is ready to be removed, you may need to just pull it out. Perhaps a better solution in that case is to shutdown the whole computer first, then pull it out.
Oh, and if the X is not working to close the menu, you probably need to install the newest version: https://portableapps.com/node/8450
MC