My "new" desktop computer -- which is now a year and a half old -- is a Dell Inspiron. If I had understood what that meant, I would have saved up a few more drachmas and bought an Optiplex, but it's too late now.
In their efforts to make the Inspiron look pretty, Dell hid all the USB ports, memory card slot, and CD/DVD drive behind flip-down doors. Okay, I can live with that. BUT ... the CD/DVD drive doesn't have an EJECT button. To open the drawer, you have to go into My Computer, find the drive, right-click on the icon, and then click on EJECT. Not very convenient, when the box is sitting right next to me and I can just reach out and touch the button -- if there's a button, as on my old desktop. I can't imagine why anyone at Dell thought that might be a good idea.
Saturday I finally decided there had to be a better way. A little Internet sleuthing brought me to a freeware utility: NirCmd.exe. Is apparently does a lot of things, none of which are of interest to me except for two. With NirCmd on my hard drive, I can (and have) set up desktop shortcuts to command line commands, one to open the CD drawer and one to close the CD drawer. Simple. Elegant, even.
So I just planted the two little icons directly above the START button, and life is good.
BTW -- for those who observe Easter, Happy Easter.