USB Safely Remove, Godsend for Gadget Junkies

If you are like me, you find that Microsoft's Safely Remove Hardware program is a royal pain in the neck. It is often slow (and causes you to lose some data due to impatience), takes too many clicks to get something done, and shows a whole lot of stuff that you just plain don't care about and never will. Fortunately the folks over at Safely Remove have a nifty application called USB Safely Remove and have just updated it to version 3.2.

Basically, USB Safely Remove lets you do everything that can with Microsoft's offering, only do more and do it better. They let you hide devices so that you don't accidentally stop them (SATA hard drives anyone?), use actual device names, give you access to keyboard shortcuts instead of forcing you to use the mouse, and is very customizable. It also lets you know what applications are using your device and keeping you from stopping it when you get that dreaded "The device cannot be stopped right now" error.