I discovered earlier this week that Windows 7 has another annoying holdover from Windows Vista. It turns out that if you have CD or DVD burner, Windows will conveniently eject the tray for you if you double-click the drive from Windows Explorer (or single click it from the file save/open dialog).
That’s a great idea EXCEPT when you have a case like this one. (Mine’s an older Sonata but the same situation applies.) Let’s think about it: Ejecting the tray when there’s a lid outside the drive that operates to keep it closed. Thank goodness I didn’t damage anything.
Thankfully, there’s a solution. It’s not a great solution. They don’t have an obvious “uncheck this to prevent Windows from stupidly ejecting your drive during accidental clicks.” Instead, you have to disable and remove burning features from Windows explorer using the group policy editor (gpedit.msc).
TLDR version/I don’t like clicking links:
To disable ejecting your CD tray after an accidental click, enter gpedit.msc into the run menu or the start menu’s search bar and then browse to: User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> and click on Windows Explorer. From here, set Remove CD Burning Features to Enabled.
3 Responses to “Annoyances: Windows 7 DVD/CD Tray Ejection”
Man, I hate stuff like that.
My computer case has a panel on the front to open that gives you access to drives of whatever sort. I have that same problem all of the time with burner programs of nearly every sort. Its an annoyance, but over time I’ve come to accept it.
I’d rather the software never eject the drive. If I put the disc in, I know damn well when I want to take it out. The problem with things like this is that it started off a very long time ago (late 90s ~98-99) when burning software first came out. Some idiot had the wise idea that ejecting the disc when the burning was complete was a great way to streamline the process.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it neglected the primary use case: Most people only ever burn one disc. Whether the drive ejects or not mostly doesn’t matter. It’s not hard to press a button, and it violates the principle of least surprise. Fortunately, most burning software now is becoming a little smarter: They give you the choice. Admittedly, it’s buried in the configs somewhere, but they do give you a choice.
As a corollary to this that I forgot about when I wrote the original article, theres yet one last annoyance in Windows 7 that, too, is a holdover from Windows Vista.
By default, whenever Windows updates itself, it will attempt to automatically reboot. To be fair, it will present a prompt allowing the user to cancel the automatic reboot for 4 minutes–after which it reboots itself. This may be handy when mass-installing updates for a large installed base, but it’s horribly useless for a development machine or other desktop that may actually have active apps open.
If you don’t want to discover that some unsaved work of yours mysteriously disappeared thanks to this lovely feature, you’ll need to turn it off from gpedit.msc under User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Updates and set the feature No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations to Enabled.
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