I purchased a 710m laptop from Dell and did a fresh installation of XP Home to get rid of the bloatware.

Got the drivers and everything up and running.

Only one last problem that I can't solve:

The Philips CD-RW burner that came with the laptop now displays under the Safely Remove Hardware tab in the lower right toolbox. I'm not sure why it defaulted to that but is there a way to prevent it from being listed? I don't want to accidentally "remove" the CD-RW when I'm removing, for example, a USB Flash drive.

Any tips appreciated,

Thanks

Removable drives are supposed to be listed under "Safely Remove Hardware," and Laptop CD/DVD drives are usually removable. If you accidentally "remove" the CD-RW via the "Safely Remove Hardware" interface, you can have it "re-installed" w/o physically removing and re-inserting the drive as follows:

1) Go to the "Device Manager:"
• Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Properites"
  -or- go to "Control Panel" and select "System"
• Click on the "Hardware" tab
• Click on the "Device Manager" button

2) Expand out one of the Device categories (such as "Disk drives")

3) Click the "Action" drop-down menu

4) Select menu option "Scan for hardware changes"

The CD-RW should now get "re-installed"

Diggler

thanks digg,

didn't realize that although still a bit confused since the CDRW wasn't listed under the remove hardware arrow when it was still using the dell bloated install.

anyways, not a big deal, just a curiosity, thanks.