HotSwap!

Once you understand what "hot swapping" means, you will immediately understand what the free HotSwap application does. Hot swapping refers to the act of removing or replacing hardware components without shutting down the system. You could, for example, replace a hard drive with another hard drive, all without having to shut down your PC.

Now that you know what what swapping means, I’m sure that it’ll come as no surprise when I tell you that HotSwap can be used to safely hot swap hardware components that are connected to your Windows PC. And speaking about Windows, t's worth mentioning that HotSwapp provides support for 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10.

While HotSwap is running, you will see its icon in the system tray. Left click the icon to bring up a list of components that can be hot swapped; select the component you want to remove and a balloon will pop up saying that the device is safely hot swapped and you can power off the drive to remove it from the system.

Right clicking HotSwap’s system tray icon will bring up the configuration menu which lets you play with a few settings, such as: change the language, choose what sort of devices will be displayed when you left click the tray icon, scan for hardware changes, choose if you want HotSwap to automatically run at startup (Autostart), and more.

HotSwap is free software. If you like it and you want to support its development, please make a donation. Visit the official HotSwap website and scroll down to the bottom, because that’s where the developer put the Donate button.

HotSwap is free and does what its name very adequately points out: it helps you hot swap hardware components.