It’s easily done. You’ve finished working on a friend’s PC, close it down and walk away – completely forgetting about the USB key you plugged in a little earlier.

Or maybe you’re at home, closing down your own PC, even though there’s a CD or DVD in the drive which you’ll need later. And then, once you realise, you’re perhaps forced to restart the system before you can eject it.

They’re both common problems, but easy to address with a little help from Free USB Guard. Just launch the program, and if you log off or shut down later then it checks for leftover discs or forgotten external drives, stops the shutdown process if any are found, and displays a suitable warning message to let you know.

Shut down your PC with a USB drive still connected and Free USB Guard will make sure you know about it

Of course this kind of alert might not always be welcome. If you’re working at home on your own PC, for instance, the chances are you won’t care at all if there are external drives connected when you shut down, and the extra dialog will just be a nuisance. But the good news here is that you’re able to customise Free USB Guard to monitor whatever you like, perhaps telling it to check a particular drive, or just look for CDs or DVDs in your optical drive, whatever makes sense for your situation.

We do have one small problem with the program, in that its RAM use seems a little excessive at over 25MB: it’s really not doing anything that complicated (although perhaps the flashy hi-res icons in its warning dialog are contributing to the problem).

That’s not a big deal, though, particularly if you’re only using Free USB Guard occasionally, and on balance the program provides an easy way to avoid some very common PC annoyances.