Removing The Safely Remove Hardware Icon
Yeah, everyone hates it. It’s a pointless icon designed to make people overparanoid about unplugging their USB device from the computer, all because some dumbass decided to yank their brand new £500 external hard drive out when it was copying files over. Let’s face it: if the activity LED on the device stops flashing, and you’re not actively using your device, the chances are you can pull it out with no problems at all. At the very most you could probably have a corrupt file there, I’m sure it’s not going to kill your device.
With all of that in mind, I’ve been searching for years now to find a way to remove the little green bastard, and I think this under rated solution by someone called “Shonk” is the perfect little application for the job.
There have been an increasing number of sightings of the little green bastard in Windows Vista, due to so many internal USB devices (Such as card readers) hanging around the computer.
You simply run the installer, which copies a program over to System32 which runs when you boot your pc. Then, if you need to safely remove your device with no icon, you simply right click on the device in question in my computer, and click “Safely Remove”.
Ha! Me and some other people from a random forum kicking Microsoft’s ass yet again.
Download Hide Safely Remove Hardware Icon.zip
52 KB - Run HideSRHi.exe when extracted.
Reader Comments
7 responses so far
1Mike 
2Tenka 
3Alan 
4Alan 
5Alan Wade 
6Alan 
7Celtic
Leave a commentNice! I can’t stand that little icon.
Perfectly awesome, I’ve been cursing that icon for years. Many thanks my friend.
Just get an error message saying Tasbar Not Found. Maybe its because my operating system is in Swedish, I dont know but the only way to get rid of it was to roll back the computer to an earlier restore point.
That would be because the icon remover program is loading after Windows Explorer - so can’t find the icon to remove. If you’ve got any version of Vista, you can set a task to run it 30 seconds after boot up, using Task Scheduler. I ended up doing that.
Also, if you wanted to stop it starting with your PC, delete it from your start up list in the registry - you don’t have to restore. You can do that with this program: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx.
Thanks - and I apologise for not pointing this issue out in the post.
Thanks for the quick response Alan. I have Vista Home Premium, could you explain how to set up a schedule. I dont have a clue.
Regards
Alan W
Apologies for the (very) delayed response. If you still want to know how to schedule a task to run the icon remover program:
Type “taskschd.msc” into your start menu search box, or in the run dialogue box. This will start the Windows task scheduler. (You will need to accept the UAC prompt to run it.)
Once it has fired up, click on “Create Task”. On the “General” tab, enter a name like “Hide Hardware Icon” or something along those lines. (This part doesn’t effect the task at all, it’s just for easy identification purposes.)
Switch to the triggers tab, and hit “New”. On the “Begin the task:” dropdown at the top change it from “On a schedule” to “At log on”.
Further down the same window is a “Delay task for:” checkbox. Check it, and change the value to “30 seconds”. Hit “OK”.
Now you’ll need the hide icon program - this is not the link in the post above - that is the icon’s installer which makes it run automatically at start up. So, download this application, and put it wherever you like. (Documents is good, or if you don’t want it there you can put it in program files or wherever you like.)
Back to task scheduler, switch to the “Actions” tab, hit “New”, and click “Browse…” to select the “hide.exe” application you just downloaded. Once you’re done, click “OK”, then “OK” again to save the task.
Now, when you reboot it should hide the icon 30 seconds after you’ve booted. Phew, I need a drink.
Great Little Utility AL!!!!