Jul 042011
 

Many years ago, I once bought a CD changer: a standard form factor internal CD-ROM drive that could “swallow” four CDs at a time, which then all appeared under different drive letters.

One of the most infuriating things about Windows (NT 4.0 at the time) was that every once in a while, when a program enumerated all drives, it caused the drive to needlessly cycle through the four CDs: clickety-click, zoom, zoom, clickety-click, zoom, zoom, clickety-click, zoom, zoom, clickety-click, zoom, zoom, taking its sweet time.

I no longer use that CD changer, but I do have several external hard drives permanently hooked up to my computer. They are Western Digital MyBook drives, which spin down after some minutes of inactivity. And… you guessed it, every once in a while, say when I am running an installer, stupid Windows spins them all up, sequentially of course, to consume as much time as possible.

I wonder if Microsoft will ever acknowledge this as an issue and fix it. Based on past experience, I am not holding my breath.

 Posted by at 1:10 pm