I have a few USB things plugged into my Windows XP box. The important ones for this story are the Compact Flash card reader and a hard drive on an IDE-to-USB adapter. For months and months, ever since having that setup, the card reader was the H: drive and the hard drive plugged into the USB adapter was the G: drive.
This morning Windows was frozen. Blank screen, mouse would move, but couldn’t get it to do anything. (See also “Why Windows Annoys Me, Volume 38″)
Ok. Turn it off and back on.
But now Windows has decided to switch those drive letters for me. The hard drive is now H:, and the CF reader is G:. Awesome. I don’t realize it until I start up Azureus to finish up some downloads, and I get a cryptic dialog box asking me to insert a disk into my hard drive. It just wants to continue the downloads onto a CF card, since it’s using drive letters to reference the drive I was downloading onto.
Just annoying. Not at all reliable. Rather than deal with the new letters and restart all the downloads in Azureus, I unplug the CF reader, and go into Computer Management and force the hard drive to be the G: drive. Windows tells me that it’ll keep it as the H: drive as well until I reboot, which means that when I plug the CF reader back in, it’s now the I: drive.
Awesome. Thank you, Windows.