Safely Remove Hardware - Video Card?

[Ziggy]

Long story short: On my Mom's computer (Vista HP) immediately after I installed SP2 and restarted I got the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the system tray. The piece of hardware it tells me I can remove is the video card! /short_story

I built my Mom a nice budget PC not too long ago (a little bit before 7 was released) and put Vista Home Premium on it. I built it using parts from her old PC and have been slowly upgrading it ever since. A while back I got a GeForce 8400 GS on the cheap to put in it. I installed the card, and it all worked nice. Then one day I noticed the remove hardware icon in the system tray, and it's for the video card. Then one day while I'm at work, my brother calls me and asks about removing the card and using the on board video. I forget what the problem was, but that's what he needed to do, and that's what was done.

So for this just passed Christmas, I got my Mom a new hard drive for the computer. So when I installed this drive the other day, I figured I'd put the 8400 back in as well. I installed the OS and everything went fine, got the latest drivers from nVidia for the card. No system tray icon.

Now just this morning I installed SP2. At the first boot to the desktop after the install there's now the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the system tray for the 8400! WTF!?

I googled this and found that others are having this 'problem' as well. Every one says it's not really a problem, just some kind of bug, but will cause no harm. People report having the remove hardware icon for optical drives and other hardware, one guy even said he got it for his RAID drives. Weird.

Any one get this problem? Found a solution? I'm just curious about it, it doesn't seem to be much of a problem except for the annoyance of the icon being there. I would like to fix this issue if I can. I'm not sure what happens if I click to remove the video card.

[ChuChu Flamingo]

At worst it would just remove the driver for the video card forcing it to use a standard driver. Hello to 800 x 600 greatness

[Ziggy]

Yeah, and I vaguely remember that happening too. Maybe that's why my brother wanted to take the card out and switch back to the on board video.

[CRTGAMER]

Maybe an updated driver? Change to lower resoplution and remove the old one first.

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

[Ziggy]

It already has the latest driver from nVidia. Maybe if I roll back and reinstall the driver the problem will go away.

[Hobie-wan]

Bios update for the mobo perhaps?

[Ziggy]

Hmm, I could check that too.

edit: Just checked. The board only has one BIOS update, and it only fixes something to do with an audio codec.



edit: My Mom's one year old digital camera is really weird, and rarely works when you plug it into a PC with USB. I'm gonna have to have my Mom use a card reader to dump her pictures from now on, which means there will be the eject option for the SD card right next to the video card eject option. I don't want my Mom to accidentally hit the eject option for the video card, so I'm gonna have to get this taken care of. Since it's a computer I built for some one else, I don't wanna settle for anything less than perfect.

If I have the time tomorrow, I'll try and roll back the driver then reinstall the latest driver from nVidia. If that doesn't work, I'll try and Google a little more. If all else fails, I might opt to getting a different video card. Maybe a different card wont prompt the eject option, though maybe any card will. I have a spare PCIe card lying around, an ATI x300 I think. If I have the time I'll swap that in and see if it gets the eject option as well.

[Hobie-wan]

Yeah, if you're going to try a different card, switching between Nvidia to ATI is a good idea in case it is something in the chipset that doesn't like that brand.

[Ziggy]

I rolled back the driver and Windows immediately prompted me to update the driver for the card, so I did. As soon as the new driver was installed, the SRH icon returned for the video card. So then I swapped the 8400 out for the ATI x300, let Windows install the driver, and then got a SRH icon for the x300! So I'm pretty sure that no matter what card I put in there, I'll have a SRH icon for it.

I found some one else that has the SRH icon for his video card in Vista. Said he got it after installing SP2, just like me. There must be some kind of bug in that service pack. Hopefully Microsoft will release a patch for it but SP2 has been out for a while, no?

Being that my Mom doesn't really know a whole lot about computers, I don't want her to have to worry about something like this. I almost wanna take the card out and just use the on board VGA, but it's rather poor.

edit: I regret my decision putting Vista on this computer. This was before 7 came out, so I had to choose between XP and Vista. I figured I'd go with Vista because I was using it on my own computer at the time and didn't see any problems with it. But HP decided NOT to make a Vista driver for my Mom's printer, so I had to install a kind of generic driver to get print functionality, but the built in card reader will not work. And now this Safely Remove Hardware crap, makes me wish I got XP instead. For another $100, I could buy an OEM copy of XP or 7, but that's not a cheap option. /rant

[Hobie-wan]

What about rolling back the driver, but then manually start windows update and tell it to stuff the video card driver update and not tell you about that particular update anymore? Or, if you're using the driver given by windows update, use the one from Nvidia or Ati instead since the MS update one is usually a little older.

Does the card reader have an activity light? Most of my flash drives have a light that flashes slowly when connected and quickly flash when reading and writing. As long as caching is turned off, you should be able to pull it out safely as long as it isn't reading or writing. Granted I'm still on XP but I don't bother ejecting flash drives anymore, just portable hard drives.