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This video looks at drive tools, caching option and removable device policy in Windows 7. The caching options in Windows 7 help improve the performance and responsiveness of your system. Drive tools like check disk can check your hard disk for errors and attempt to fix them. Removable device policy allows you to quickly allow or disallow removable devices in Windows 7.
Caching options
To access the caching options for a hard drive or for removable drives, right click any drive and open the properties. In the properties window, select the hardware tab. This will show all the device drivers of all the drives in the system. This includes other drives, not just the one for which you opened the properties. For example, if you wanted to configure the USB device driver and did not have a USB drive in the system, open the properties for any drive like a hard disk and the USB device driver will still appear in the hardware tab even if no USB thumb drive is present in the system. Select the device driver you want to modify or view and open the properties. In properties, select the policies tab. Listed below are the options available depending on the device driver you select.
Hard Disk device driver policy settings
Enable Writing Caching on the device: When this option is enabled which is the default, Windows will use the cache on the drive to buffer writes. This speeds up performance on the hard disk but data in the cache will be lost if power is suddenly cut from the device.
Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device: This setting should only be ticked in rare troubleshooting scenarios. When Windows has finished writing it can request the buffers on the device be flushed. This ensures that data is transferred from the cache to the device. If unticked, the data may remain in the cache longer than it needs to be.
USB device driver policy settings
Quick removal: When this option is configured, Windows will not cache any writes to the USB device. This means that a program will appear to pause while it is saving data to the USB drive. Once the data is saved the user will be given control of the program again. The advantage of this setting is the user is less likely to pull the USB device out of the computer before Windows has finished writing to it.
Better performance: This setting will cache all writes to the USB device returning control to the program immediately. The user should eject the device before removing it to ensure that all writes to the device have completed.
Removable Device Policy
Removable device policy in Windows 7 allows the administrator to quickly and easily allow or disallow access to removable media. Before Windows 7, the administrator would have to get the hardware ID from the details tab and used this in group policy to disable the required devices.
The settings for removal devices can be found under Computer Configuration-Administrative Templates-System-Removable Storage Access.
The settings in here allow you to configure read, write and execute access on removable devices. These include optic, floppy disk, tape drives and WPD (Windows Portable Devices). WPD includes smart phones, cameras and media players. Windows 7 also gives you the option to force a reboot if a user does not restart the computer after a certain amount of time.
Check disk
The check disk utility in Windows 7 comes in a GUI and command line version. Both can check drives for errors and attempt to fix them. Also checks can be done on all the sectors on the device to make sure that there are no bad sectors. If the device is in use, Windows will prompt you to run the disk check next time the computer starts up.
When you run check disk from the command line it will only perform a read only scan. In order to fix errors you need to run chkdsk /f
MCTS 70-680: Windows 7 Disk Tools and Removal Device Policy microsoft store | |
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| Education | Upload TimePublished on 7 Feb 2012 |
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