Hey all, With a dual boot setup - W7 7100 x64 versus Vista Ultimate x64 - I'm trying to see if it's worth using W7 RC as an initial replacer for Vista. I know, it's a beta but so far it seems to work very well. My compliments. Ok, I had some problems with W7 installing my older printer/copier from Sharp AR-206, which doesn't exist anymore in this W7 RC version. This problem was easily solved by copying and paste the \system32\spool\drivers\x64 folder from Vista to W7 including extracting the CAB files. It's not how it should be but therefore it's still under development, so for me for the moment no problem. Then there's another problem which pops up everywhere on the Internet and even here, which I don't know what it is and how to solve it. I do believe this is not really a problem but it seems I've forgotten something somewhere and that's freezing Windows Explorer and loosing my external USB drive . Ok, what the situation. I've got an external USB 2.0 data drive for backup purposes. Inside my PC I have a Windows drive and a second data drive. This internal data drive is used for all my work and daily I synchronize this with the external RAID 1 USB drive. When W7 starts, there's no problem at all. This means via Windows Explorer I do see all the drives and can access them. For some reason at a certain moment - I'm not in sleeping mode or whatever since I disabled this option - I click the external USB drive but it's not responding. When I leave this like it is, I can still work with the PC thus doing anything as long as I leave the not responding Explorer alone. After x minutes, the not responding window closes by itself. When I start again Windows Explorer it works again and I can do eveything I want except that the external uSB drive is gone with the wind. The only way to get it back is to restart the PC. Not really a big problem but I do believe this seems a simple problem since it's - as far as I've seen on the Internet - seems not a typical W7 problem. I've seen the same for Vista and XP but don't know of course if this gives the same solution as for W7. Anyway, I hope my problem is clear and that soembody is able to give some tips. Kind regards, Angelique van Campen

Hi Angelique, This kind of issues can be caused by several reasons, such as software confliction, hardware problem or the driver compatibility issues. I suggest that you boot in Clean Boot Mode .This method will help us determine if this issue is caused by a loading program or service. Please perform the following steps: 1. Click the Start Button type "msconfig" (without quotation marks) in the Start Search box, and then press Enter. Note: If prompted, please click Continue on the User Account Control (UAC) window.2. Click the "Services" tab, check the "Hide All Microsoft Services" box and click "Disable All" (if it is not gray). 3. Click the "Startup" tab, click "Disable All" and click "OK". Then, restart the computer. When the "System Configuration Utility" window appears, please check the "Don't show this message or launch the System Configuration Utility when Windows starts" box and click OK. Please test this issue in the Clean Boot environment, if the issue disappears in the Clean Boot environment, we can use a 50/50 approach to quickly narrow down which entry is causing the issue. However, if the issue still occurs in Clean Boot Mode, the reason may be the system build-in USB storage driver is not compatible with the external hard drive. Another possible reasons is the RAID driver. What is model of the RAID 1 controller? Is there any driver can be installed manually? If not, currently the worked RAID driver will be the system build in driver that may not work well with your external RAID 1. In this case, you may try to dismiss the RAID 1 and check if it works properly when the drives are simple SATA/IDE drives.Arthur Xie - MSFT