LOL AndrewVos's works properly now. On his blog (and in an email to me) he mentioned a DLL that was missing. So, having resolved that, I'll be able to test and see if the program serves my above stated purpose. :) Oh, and it takes up just over 1MB, so I'm not concerned at all about it being a memory hog. I'll report back (day or three) when I've tested it on one of my production, public-oriented machines.

hnkelley

@hnkelley: BTW, an important thing to note about AndrewVos's tool is that he states clearly that he developed this on Vista 64 and has not tested it elsewhere, so I expected it to fail on my system.

hnkelley

Well, I've tried both at home on my laptop and at the office on my Dell desktop. Both systems are XP Pro-SP2, fully up to date. The DeskDrive software seems to be kind of a kludge in that it has its own timer (default seems to be 4 seconds) for polling the ports. Some have said this program is a memory hog and runs really slow. It is a little slow, but it works. (My testing for my specific needs is yet to come, though.)

The one from AndrewVos didn't seem to do anything at all on either system. I see it in Task Manager, but nothing is happening. Andrew, I'm not a programmer, but I'm very willing to help test. I'll PM you and see what we can do.

My question about this is, isn't there a quick and dirty way to do this? Using the AutoPlay function of Windows and TweakUI's ability to create new AutoPlay choices, shouldn't we be able to create a script that runs when the USB subsystem detects the USB device being plugged in? That way, there is nothing running in memory, so being a memory hog is a non-issue. I just haven't figured out the script yet (had the thought, went to bed anyway).

hnkelley

@CultofMac: My Linux distro does it also. And you want to know the best part. It is free. Flame on people.

jkersh

ASuite (like PStart but actively developed) launcher does this and more.

l337_7r4d3r

I dont get it. Just open 'My Computer', drag the icon to your desktop, and you're done...why do you need extra software?

caedus

@hnkelley: Yeah check it out for XP, and if it doesn't work leave a comment or email me. I'll do some more work on it and test it out on additional systems if there's interest.

AndrewVos

@psr: For most people, this isn't all that helpful, depending on their style of usage. However, some might like it and others (me) have a possible use for it: the public PCs at work. We have these things pretty well locked down and only allow access to a select few drives (D:\ for the CD and F:\ for the USB). I'd like to be able to allow more simultaneous USB drives without cluttering the desktop with icons that go nowhere when nothing is plugged in (some of our users are, um, less than technologically astute). I'll check this out (along with the other version from @AndrewVos, especially if it's usable/modifiable for XP Pro). Hopefully, I'll be able to comment on it's usefulness for this type of function later in the week.

hnkelley

Well I was going to mention my mac...

But I see some Windows fans can't take a joke and went ahead and started calling people fanboys...

Myles

Can I use this program with my TRS-80 Model I?

-thegrumpyadmin.com

thegrumpyadmin

Interesting. But I fail to see the greatness of this application. How hard is it to bring up the run dialog, and entering the appropriate drive by entering e:\? Or are there anything else this does? Or do we realy need more memory hungry useless applications?

psr

Made another version of this today for myself. Doesn't use a timer like this app... (It's only been tested on Vista 64, so no complaining)

Get it here:
[www.andrewvos.com]

AndrewVos

An alternative which does this and lots of other cool stuff is ac'tivaid (see http://www.heise.de/ct/activaid/default_en.shtml). highly recommended!

EricKoopman

@astrosmash: @astrosmash: @oboreruhito: it's actually got nothing to do with .net here. this is just a kinda crappy little program...

natenovs

Elitist comments should be a bannable offence. I'm sure we're all sick of this back and forth crap. It doesn't contribute anything to the post and it makes you look like a tool. :(

Eris

@CultofMac:

or I can buy a PC for a third of the price, do what I want to do with it rather than do what it tells me I want to do, and get this bonus feature that means absolutely nothing to the computing experience for free. Tough choice, I know.

c0dek

@atle: I wouldn't mind finding out how to enable the feature with KDE, as it is now I have permanent shortcuts to all the media I've known to plug into my computer.

TCK

This is the only thing Macs have that makes me jealous (that you can't get in a freeware program). Yay! Hopefully now that the first one is out, someone will find a way to improve on it and get rid of the lag.

ant2206

@CultofMac: Yes. This one feature would be the reason to ditch an entire operating system, hardware, and everything that goes with it. Sigh. Fanboys make me tired.

witeowl

Get a Mac. OS X has this feature built in.
Derrr.

CultofMac

Gee, I've never used a more laggy piece of software. Right clicking on the system tray icon just to get a menu took a good amount of time. Then doing anything with the shortcuts themselves was horrible with my experience. Pass this one up, not worth it.

MrEggsalad

@atle:

It's pretty simple; here's a how-to...

[www.howtogeek.com]

Calvin89

@atle: [tombuntu.com]

"Press Alt-F2 to bring up the Run Application dialog. Type gconf-editor and click Run.

In the left pane of the window, browse to apps->nautilus->desktop. Uncheck the volumes_visible option and the partitions on your desktop will disappear."

oboreruhito

This is great... you would not believe how many people have emailed me asking for this same functionality. Now I can finally give them a solution.

The How-To Geek

"The downside: Desk Drive takes up way too much memory (around 17MB in my test)"

Behold the future of Windows. All hail .NET!

Anyway, if you can't eject using those same desktop shortcuts then this is at best only half the solution.

A much more useful solution would be, say, a Taskbar panel that automatically populates itself with your mounted drives, and provides shortcuts to both open and eject those drives.

astrosmash

I like to keep my desktop clean, with or without an USB disk plugged in. So instead of messing up the Windows desktop, does anyone know how to remove this "feature" in Ubuntu?

atle

@pschroeter: Ah, OK, thanks. I guess I can see how that would matter to people who actually leave icons on the desktop, as opposed to freaks like me who have everything tucked away in autohiding sidebars. (^,^)

witeowl

@witeowl:
I assume that you can leave the desktop free of shortcuts to the drive, but one will appear if you have something in a drive and then go away when it is empty...
Like My Mac Did 20 Years Ago!

pschroeter

Am I missing something here? I went once into "My Computer", right-clicked on the drive, and clicked on "create shortcut". Windows complains that it can't create a shortcut there, and would I like the shortcut on my desktop instead? I said yes.

Now I have a shortcut on my desktop so I can easily open up my thumb drive with a single double-click. What does this do differently (other than take up resources)?

witeowl