How to create shortcut/hotkey combo for safely remove hardware box

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Office, Productivity, Microsoft, Freeware

How to create shortcut/hotkey combo for safely remove hardware box

by Danny Mendez Mar 14th 2008

Like any normal human being with a computer, you probably use your USB jacks, and according to OS market-share statistics, you're machine is probably some flavor of Windows. So you're probably familiar with having to click that annoying little icon to bring up the SRH (Safely Remove Hardware) dialog box when you need to disconnect a USB device, but it's possible to make the disconnect process a little easier.

In order to create a shortcut/hotkey combo to pull up the SRH box, right click anywhere on the desktop and go to "New" then "Shortcut". Paste the text below into the box asking you, "what item you would like to create a shortcut for?"

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

That shortcut will open the SRH box. At this point, you can place the shortcut anywhere -- including the quick-launch bar.

In order to create a hotkey set for the shortcut, right click on its icon and go to properties. Choose the "Shortcut" tab.

Add in a hotkey set for the shortcut and it's done. Every time you press key combination, it'll open the safely remove hardware dialog box.

There's another way to go about this, though it only works for USB disks (flash and HDD). The program is the USB Disk Ejector, which runs on both XP and Vista. It's also free like this tutorial.

Tags: remove-hardware, shortcuts, usb

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

ronmoses said 12:21PM on 3-14-2008

Do people actually bother with "Safely Remove Hardware"? I never have, I just unplug. Never had an issue, but maybe my life isn't as USB-intensive as some folks'.

Christian said 12:30PM on 3-14-2008

I do, last time I did that my flash drive was no longer usable.

Only time I do just unplug it without doing that option is with the USB external HDD

Aaron said 12:42PM on 3-14-2008

Make sure you left click on the tray icon and not double click as well. It brings up a nice, easy to read set of options -- devices you can remove. Click and remove! It's much easier to use and understand at a glance than the crazy dialog you show above.

RP said 1:20PM on 3-14-2008

Thanks. This is another example where Microsoft could have made this every-day operation 10x easier with a decent UI, but instead they expose device-driver details that my Mom has no clue about. Just like the Print Screen button. Come on, Microsoft -- time to start innovating again.

Gino said 2:04PM on 3-14-2008

Which is the advantage of double click on a desktop icon as described here instead of double click on the USB remove icon in the system tray?
Really I see no difference...

Judd said 2:54PM on 3-14-2008

I reckon the same difference between the glass being half full and the glass being half empty. They both have the same amount of water, it's just how you look at it

James said 10:54AM on 3-28-2008

Did you miss the part where you can assign a keyboard shortcut? Some of us don't like having to find a 16x16 pixel icon on our big-ass displays and/or wait for our taskbar to pop up (if you have it on auto-hide, which I do). I like to be able to do things without looking for the button to click on screen.

tevetorbes said 2:50PM on 3-15-2008

I'll admit- not a Windows user, so maybe I'm missing something, but every Windows PC I've used has a little icon in the system tray that you can single left-click and choose "Safely remove hardware" or some such. This allows the drive to be unplugged safely.

What's with the dialog-box-shortcut-hotkey assignment? It seems overly complicated for complicated's sake...

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