My Computer on the Taskbar

[HoppaLong]

I've got a "My Computer" toolbar on the Taskbar. After selecting a menu item the system
checks the floppy disk drive about half the time. Why not all the time? I don't know. It
happens more frequently when I eject a USB stick. The menu briefly hangs before the
the system checks the floppy drive.

This is not directly related, but it's the only option in 98SE that effects your floppy disk
drive. Years ago I removed the tick from System Properties > Performance > File System
Properties > Floppy Disk > "Search for new floppy disk drives each time your computer starts."

I haven't googled about this yet, but it seems like a Registry hack is a possible solution.
Maybe it's just another quirk that you have to accept with these older Windows systems.

[HoppaLong]

Understandably, no replies. I've got the solution.

I forgot about several tweaking apps on my Start Menu. Microsoft's Tweak UI had the
fix. Under the "My Computer" tab you select or deselect drives and partitions. I simply
unticked the floppy drive (A:).

Not 100% sure why this works. The floppy drive is not disabled. It can be accessed from
any shortcut. Like most of you, I've got many bootable flash drives. The only time I might
use a floppy disk is to restore the CMOS settings when the backup battery (CR2032) is
replaced.

[Drugwash]

Your particular setup is probably seldom used, hence the lack of replies.

 

Reading from floppy is most likely triggered by a request not only for enumerating all the present drives but also for their total/used/free capacity. The fact that this happens only sometimes may indicate that the check is performed only when at least one of the drives' used/free space has been modified since the last enumeration. Unfortunately I can't tell exactly who is doing this, when, why or how to disable the behavior.

 

What I can tell is that many, many years ago I had disabled one drive in that list of drives presented by TweakUI - it may have been drive B but I'm not sure - and subsequently I experienced a weird behavior which unfortunately I do not remember what consisted of but was bad enough to carve into my mind "never disable a drive in TweakUI". So please do keep this in mind in case your system starts behaving abnormally.

 

Off-topic but related to your last remark: depending on your BIOS brand/version and your skills you may extract/save the current BIOS image to a file, edit it with a dedicated application to change the defaults exactly as you want them to be, save it as a modified file and flash it to the CMOS. This way your settings will always be the desired ones even when battery fails or while it's being replaced (although if you're quick enough the settings won't get lost). I did that to a couple motherboards in the past. The tricky part is finding the best and most compatible version of the BIOS editor for your particular brand/version. And please do keep in mind that (re)flashing the BIOS is always risky if power failure occurs, floppy drive/disk errors out or a bad/wrong image is being flashed.

[submix8c]

AFAICR (and could be wrong) a "shortcut" is "created" in "Recent Documents" (whatever) to any file you may have accessed on a Floppy, and the OS will "look for it". Clearing the "Recent" takes care of it -or- deleting the entry(ies) in that User's "Recent" Folder.

 

Of course, my memory may be failing on that.