First the Media Center Annoyance, whenever I plug in a thumb drive or flash card, Media Center would start reading it and sometimes would end up blocking me from ejecting the device. I’d been trying to figure out how to stop this from happening for a long time with no luck. One day I decided to search around for a solution and I found it on this page (the third post on the page).
I’ve been switching to USB connected external drives for data backup ever since I started doing a bunch of video editing because the giant files would overwhelm my NAS that holds the backups for my other projects. An annoying problem was that the drive letters assigned by Windows would sometimes vary and other times would get locked in to drive letter. For backup purposes I need to have the drive letters be consistent and I found the Holy Grail of USB drive letter management, USB Drive Letter Manager for Windows (USBDLM) by Uwe Sieber. It is definitely not for the average PC user but if you’ve got the skills it is a fantastic little service. I need to check out the other little utilities and services on the web site. I especially need to check out the COM-Port manager it will likely save me from having to use the COM port deletion technique from my previous blog post (note to self, do this before buying that 8 port adapter).
Paul Hutchinson's Blog 