Might be a dumb question

[Sgt_Strider]

I notice that when I plug in a USB device to my computer, a small icon called "safely remove hardware" is located to the right of the taskbar. Do I really need to load that up and disable the hardware before removing my USB device like my card reader or I can just ignore it and take out my USB card reader?

 

[MrkXCeL]

Win 2K was picky about that. WinXP no problems as long as you do as Valex said

 

[MN Scout]

I'd be safe and do all the clickies. I've heard of a lot of horror stories of people corrupting the data on their thumb drives. There's going to be that one time that you'll wish you did.

 

[Excelsius]

The official rule is that if your flash/drive is FAT32 formatted (most flash drives, unless you reformat them), you don't have to click anything. If it is NTFS, then you should. I don't do it either, most of the time, and I don't have any problems.

 

[darktiger]

I use to just pull it out. That was until I got corrupted images/pics. Now I do the remove hardware, and I do not get corrupted pics. I think that explorer.exe still is using some files, or will not close some files. When you pull it out, sometimes data corrupting can happen..IMO

 

[KevinO]

I have also had problems with corruption on my old USB card reader if I did not use the remove hardware safely option. Of course, I usually did my copy or whatever and then wanted to instantly remove it. I am sure if you let it sit long enough Windows will "release the hold" of the files.