Optical drive issues

The notebook I have is in my sig.

Currently as the computer is setup there is the safety remove hardware icon in the system tray and it has the optical drive listed there. I am trying to disable it so I can save battery (and it is rare I use the drive), but it keeps on saying that a program is using it so I can not disable it. How can I find out what is using it?

 

Is anything running in Task manager? Try logging out and back on and see if it helps any.

 

This has been going on for awhile but now I need the battery life but I was able to disable it before.

Task manager does not show anything that I know uses the drive.

 

Have you tried rebooting? I know that this might not be the best solution if you are on the road and using your computer though...
It might could be just a bug. But, you don't want to risk messing up your laptop by just pulling out the drive abruptly.

 

I dont mean to pull i out but just to turn it off to save power. I have tried re booting several times.

I am trying to "remove" it through safety remove hardware and when I go to power save mode by default it powers down the drive but I always get the warning saying that a program is using it and I dont know what it is.

And there is no disc in the drive

 

The same happens with one of my external HDDs...

I'm not quite sure how the safely remove hardware works.

Did you try twicein sccession?

It has happened to me that an HDD needed to spin up for me to remove it... ??

 

You could try to remove the device via Device Manager.

 

EXPLORER is using it. Windows Explorer monitors all drives, removable and fixed.

Windows treats optical drives differently than usb drives.

As Bog noted, disable it in device manager, or if you can, in your bios.

I doubt you are saving much battery life, though. If it is not spinning, it isn't using battery life.

 

I do think that the hardware abstraction layer used in Windows regularly polls devices such as optical discs for any media, though I don't know how much power this uses. In Linux, the Intel-based power-saving utility called PowerTop reports something similar.

 

Yes, you are correct that windows polls optical discs...that is why the drive is "in use", but if it were not polling the optical drive it would still be polling the other existing drives.

Removing the drive doesn't save any battery.

 

There you go, if removing the drive doesn't save any battery, then you don't need to take it out.

 

Well my SZ has the option to switch of my CD drive... it has to save some power...

Why would they incorporate it otherwise?

 

That is what I was thinking

 

I doubt that it would make a big difference, unless you constantly have a CD or DVD in it so that Windows will spin up every time you hit "My Computer."