They say CD and DVD drives are going the way of the dinosaur soon, but in the meantime, many of us still use them – for installing software, for backing up data, for transferring data from one computer to another, for watching movies or playing music. Sure, you can eject the disc by pushing the hardware button or going through the menu, but if you’re a keyboard wizard who hates to remove your hands from the home keys, wouldn’t it be handy to have a key combo to do it? Here’s how to do that:

1. Download NirCmd from Nirsoft (link at the bottom of the instructions).
2. Right click on the desktop or in Windows Explorer and select New, then Shortcut. You need to first create a shortcut to which you can assign the key combination.
3. In the “Location” field, type the path to where you saved the nircmd.exe file, and at the end of it, add “cdrom open , with quotes around the path, so the entry looks like this if you saved the NirCmd utility to a folder called SavedStuff on drive C and your CD drive is D: “c:SavedStuffnircmd.exe” cdrom open D:
4. Name the shortcut and put it wherever you want. You can put it on the desktop and double click it to eject the CD that way.
5. Right click the shortcut icon and select Properties.
6. Click the Shortcut tab.
7. In the “Shortcut key” field, choose the key combination you want to use to eject the CD and click OK.

Here’s where you can download the free NirCmd tool, which you’ll note does more than just eject discs:
http://www.win7news.net/TUHT2C/110818-Nir-Sofer