Restore 'Safely Remove Hardware' Icon

For the past few days, the icon 'safely remove hardware' on my taskbar is missing. I wondered if I could restore the missing icon.

On googling for a few minutes, I have found three solutions to my issue.

Solution I :

1. Open My Computer
2. Right click on the USB flash drive and click Properties
3. Click on the Hardware tab and select the removable drive from the list
4. Click the Properties button
5. Click on the Policies tab
6. Change it from “Optimize for quick removal” to “Optimize for performance” (You can change it back to Optimize for quick removal once the Safely Remove Hardware icon has been restored)

Solution II :

1. Right click your notification area (next to the clock)
2. Select Properties
3. Uncheck the entry titled: Hide inactive icons (You can also try setting the value 'Always Show' for 'SafelyRemovehardware' on clicking 'Customize' button)
   
4. Click OK

Solution III :

The above two solutions didn't work for me.
Finally, I have found a solution that worked. Here it is:

1. Click on Start > Run to see run box on the screen.
2. Type or paste the command: RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
3. Click OK to see “Safely remove hardware” settings window.

Now you can proceed to safely remove connected USB drive.

I have found that many people are facing this problem. I think this issue in fixed in the later versions of Windows XP. Because, I have never faced such a problem in Vista or Win7.

How to use GTalk VoiceConference

GTalk is a very popular instant messaging software. It provides many useful features. Two of those features are GroupChat and VoiceChat.

Anyways, there is a small limitation that these two features cannot be used in combination i.e. VoiceConference

Here is a small trick to use VoiceConference:

• Open up a copy of Google Talk on all the computers which you wish you conference
• After a instance is opened up in all computers, make a new shortcut for Google Talk but at the end add /nomutex (to do this right click on the new shortcut icon and edit the target field; it should look something similar to “C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe” /nomutex assuming your gtalk installation is done in default location)
• Now open up the second instance on every computer using the shortcut. Nomutex argument will let gtalk to open multiple instances.
• Now, we need to create a chain to connect all the systems. Let us assume we do this for 3 participant now (say A, B and C)
• Participant A should call Participant B via one instance
• Participant B will call Participant C on other instance
• Participant C will connect to Participant A to form a loop
• Now all participants in the conference are connected