Unnecessary Complexity

If you are a long term Windows user, you right-click everything.  That right-click menu offers a lot of options, and it is comforting to see everything that you can do at any given time.  Heck… you can often Shift-right-click and get even MORE options.

There is an interesting place within Windows where the right-click adds much more complexity, and I’ll bet you’ve been using it forever :)

Safety removing hardware (for safely removing external hard drives, USB keys, etc).

Tell me if this sequence of actions looks familiar…  You right-click on the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the system tray,

You get the “Safely Remove Hardware” window, where you select the USB Mass Storage Device” and hit Stop.

Next comes the “Stop a Hardware device” window that has your single device listed in 3 different ways.  Select one, hit “OK”, and your device is finally ready to unplug from your computer.

A mere right-click, left click, left click, left click, left click, left click.

If only there were a better way!  It turns out there is, and it has been staring you in the face the whole time ;)  Simply LEFT click at the very beginning, and you can directly remove the device without having to navigate through a ton of windows.

It’s that easy.  (I believe this behavior goes back several versions of Windows, although I’m not going to move off of Windows 7 to check for you ;)

Good news… In Windows 7, both left AND right-clicking gives you the same menu :)