OK, you're probably thinking that Andrew has finally flipped. How can keeping a CD in your CD-ROM actually speed up your Windows 95 machine?

Windows 95 and above has an option called CD auto-insert notification. With most CD-ROMs, when a CD is inserted into your CD-ROM drive, Windows automatically is notified of this action. This way, it can automatically play music CDs or automatically run software from your CD.

Unfortunately, Windows polls the CD-ROM drive quite a bit. On slower systems, this polling can be quite noticeable and detrimental to your system performance. Plus, whenever Windows polls an empty CD-ROM drive, it normally takes longer to do so than when it polls a CD-ROM drive with a disk already in the unit. So, to speed up the polling process, always keep a CD in your drive.

Now, here's the downside to this tip that I feel needs to be mentioned (it was mentioned to me by a technician friend). If you ever need to service your computer or have it serviced by a technician, be sure to remove the CD from the CD-ROM drive before you start your work. If your computer is on and your case is flipped around (a common procedure when dealing with motherboards), you could possibly (although the risk is low) damage your current CD.

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