The drives are not indexed by Windows 7. The drives are excluded from AVG. Other than AVG, the startup is stock – I don’t have a bunch of other applications starting until I manually start them.
If I go into the taskbar’s USB manager, it tells me the drive is still in use – even right after starting the computer.
Windoze help wasn’t any further assistance.
If I install SmartWare, then the drives can be safely removed through the Smartware taskbar icon, without giving me a “still in use” message, but if I uninstall Smartware, something in Win7 won’t release the drive(s) through the stock USB manager.
I’d prefer not to run the Smartware, but I’d also like to be able to swap the drives back and forth with my WDTV as I create movie sheets and add more media files. I don’t want to shut the computer down every time I need to disconnect a drive.
Did you have another AV on before you installed the AVG? If so check that manufacturers site for a removal tool. Sometimes they leave behing troublesome stuff. Do you have any anti spyware runnung? Try disabling Windows Defender. Can you disable the AVG on startup and make sure it isn’t the problem?
No AV before AVG. Was a brand new hard drive in the PC with a fresh install of Win7. My suspicions run towards something related to Windows starting up, because if I plug the external drive(s) in once the computer is running, I can usually (but not always) get the drive to safely dismount – it’s mostly when the drive’s connected at bootup that makes it so it can’t be disconnected. I’m still going through things and looking at possibilities.
Windows Defender tells me it’s turned off, but that doesn’t automatically mean it can’t be causing the problem.
Is it possible that it’s Window’s Defragger running in back ground? You might want to check on that. I used th use AVG but gave up several years ago. There were a couple files it didn’t like and just running the mouse over the row was enough to trigger a scan in background that made computer unresponsive. One of the files was a download of SP 2 for XP. I switched to Avast free and use that.
