By using the ^_ symbol on the PAP platform, one gets the "Safe remove hardware" window with all USB hardware pieces, a Properties button and an "End" button (I have the German interface, so translation is approximative). Anyway, it's the same window you'd get by DOUBLE-clicking on the "Safe remove hardware" icon in the system tray. This is leading to confusion, especially since the default of the window is having the "Show components" unchecked and you might have 2 or 3 "USB Mass storage device"s. Then you have to click your way through menus, which is really annoying and error-prone.
It would be much nicer to silently eject the drive (i.e. simulate a SINGLE click on the "Safe remove hardware" icon and the choice of the hard drive from which PAP was launched).
I wrote a small batch file to:
- kill the PAP Launcher using tskill command under XP (seems to work on both Pro and Home) [obvious platform limitation here, not compatibile with Win98 and, I think, NT4/Win 2k]
- eject the drive using RemoveDrive from http://www.uwe-sieber.de/drivetools_e.html#RemoveDrive
It's a two-liner:
REM Stops the App Launcher and unmounts the USB drive
REM Might have to use taskkill on XP Pro (switch & Co)
tskill PortableAppsPlat*
REM Eject the drive
RemoveDrive.exe \ -b
I then compiled the batch file to generate an EXE (so that PAP can use it) using Bat2Exe converter by Fatih Kodak.
Could I dare to suggest to the dev team to take pretty much the same approach (or, I am sure, there are way better ones for real programmers, as opposed to scripters wannabes like me) and set the eject button in the PAP start menu to do the same thing? Even more, I guess the program might check which apps/files are still open on the drive, present them to you, so that you can close them gracefuly (or not) and then eject the drive.
Many thanks!
[removed double post - moderator PP]