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It won't make you wealthy, but CDEject will make you feel coddled. Maybe that's all you can hope for, after all.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Tired of the same old stuff? How about a way to open the CD drawer from your keyboard?


Sept. 10, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   When my wife Nancy and I went shopping for her first PC in 1996, I was amazed when I saw a computer from Compaq in a local store. It had a volume control for the PC's sound right on the front of the monitor, just where it would be on a TV. You could turn the volume up or down without reaching for a mouse or clicking a key.
   I was impressed. Why hadn't computer manufacturers done this before?
   So much for progress. Compaq's great idea turned out to be just another marketing ploy. The volume control disappeared in the next model run. Compaq decided it didn't want to take chances. Make PC's like everybody else does and nobody can complain.
   Except me. And you. I'm convinced that PC manufacturers are stuck in a rut. Most of them make ugly beige boxes that are hard to use. They're not getting the message. We just keep buying dreck and they keep making the same.
   What would I like to see changed?
   I'd start with the idea Compaq had. They should put the volume control at the bottom of the screen. On one of my monitors, there's a big round button that you can push in to do one thing and turn to do something else. (It adjusts the picture.) The PC's volume control could be just like that. Push it in to turn the sound on or off, and turn it to make the sound louder or softer.
   Then I'd add a little button on the keyboard that would open or close the CD drawer on the PC. Some manufacturers are already doing that. They're selling their computers with keyboards that have special keys that eject CDs and do a lot more. That's the kind of thinking we need.
   One more idea for this week. How about PCs that don't take up a lot of space? A few weeks ago my radio partner Gene Wolf and I stopped over at the local Macintosh user group and saw an impressive demonstration of the Mac G4 Cube. This is a computer that measures 8 inches all around. It's got a transparent plastic outer shell.
   I could stack six of those G4 Cubes in the space my Pentium Schmentium Tower PC takes up.
   Sigh! This could get discouraging. Most PC makers aren't going to put volume controls on their monitors anytime soon. And you won't find a Compaq Cube or Dell 8-inch PC next month at CompUSA.
   But save your sanity and do the next best thing.
   Put a CD eject button on your keyboard. It won't cost you a cent. I'll explain how to do it step by step.
   You can do it with a free program I found at a Russian Web site. It's called CDEject. It's only for Windows PCs.
   CDEject can be downloaded from http://psg.boom.ru/cdeject.html. (Note that the address doesn't have "WWW" in it.)
   After you download it CDEject, unzip it and make sure all the files are in one folder. (Name the folder CDEject if you're not sure what to do or if your unzipping software doesn't do that for you.) Move the entire CDEject folder and all its contents to the Program Files folder. (Drag the folder using the right mouse button and choose "Move" when you let go of the button.)
   Open the folder you just moved and right click on the CDEject program file. Choose "Copy."
   Now you need to put a shortcut to CDEject in the Start Menu. Right click on the Start button and choose "Open." The Start Menu will open. Find the Programs folder and open it. Find the StartUp folder and open it. Right click on a blank area in the Start Up folder window and choose "Paste Shortcut." Close all the windows on your screen and reboot.
   When Windows starts up again, CDEject will appear in the System Tray, near the clock.
   Right click on the CDEject icon in the tray and choose "Options."
   You'll see a small dialog box that lets you assign the key that will open and close the CD tray. Forget the modifier keys -- the Alt, Ctrl, Shift and Win keys. Pressing two keys at the same time might be fine for intricate word processing, but this is just a key to poke a CD back out into the daylight. Do yourself a favor and assign a single key with no modifiers.
   My choice: The Print Screen key, one row above the Insert key. (On our version of CDEject, the Russian-to-English translation is a little too literal, and this key is called the "Snapshot" key.)
   (If you ever really need to use the Print Screen key to take screen shots -- it doesn't "print" anything in Windows, despite the name -- just choose "Exit" from the CDEject pop-up menu. It will run again the next time you boot your PC.)
   Once you've set up CDEject to use the keystroke you prefer, you don't need to do anything else. Whether a CD is in the drive or not, pressing the key will make the CD drawer pop open. (If you have one of those rare toaster-slot CD drives, nothing will happen if the drive is empty, of course; if a disk is present, it will slide out.) Pressing the same key again will make the drawer close or will make the slot-loading CD disappear into the slot.
   It won't make you wealthy and it won't put a volume control on your monitor, but CDEject will make you feel coddled. Maybe that's all you can hope for, after all.