Desk Drive is a free program that adds automatic shortcuts on the desktop to flash drives and other media when you plug them in, and removes these shortcuts automatically when the drives are unplugged. Supported media include (CD’s/DVD’s, removable drives, fixed drives, networked and RAM drives).
The idea behind this rather original program is to spare you the need to go hunting in “My computer” for a flash drive’s letter number in order to access it when you need it, but rather magically make a shortcut to it appear on the desktop when it is plugged in, and disappear when the drive is unplugged. Honestly this should have been an option in Windows.
The not-so-good news: this program takes up 18 megs in memory, which is surely a lot for this kind of program (and requires MS .NET Framework v2). Also, I’m not sure why but this program did not work on my work computer, but worked just fine on my laptop at home; could it be because I have .NET v3.5 at work? Lastly, I would have liked the option to make the tray icon not be shown.
The verdict: while it might use up a good chunk of memory this is an original, interesting program that could be very useful to some users. You will simply have to weight the cost/benefit: the extent of practical usefulness you foresee vs. whether your computer has the memory to spare.
Version Tested: 1.0
Compatibility: Windows XP; no info on Vista. Requires .NET 2.0 Framework.
Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 500K).
wow, that sounds like a good deal of memory for not much return. Incidentally, Gnome (and I think KDE) do this by default in Linux, and now I can’t live without it, seeing as how I now have a least a 1Gig thumb drive behind my work badge all the time – it’s very helpful. Also in Linux I now use sshfs – which allows you to add a shortcut to your desktop that is a folder on a remote server over ssh – the FUSE based sshfs system keeps it connected so it’s just like using a local folder. Cuts down on having to ‘scp -r’ stuff all over the place too!
fak3r
1. Assign permanent drive letter to flash drive.
2. Create shortcut.
Cuts need for framework, 3rd party utility and 18 Mb of memory.
Try opening the settings dialogs and then dismissing it. Memory usage drops to about 1.7 MB on my machine.
.NET programs exhibit different memory usage than normal programs so the memory use can be a bit misleading.
My black and whit Mac Plus,did this 20 years ago!
Hello ,
Your site is the best for finding good freewares !
But there’s a better alternative for detecting automatically USB drives : USBLDM
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html
USBDLM is Freeware for private and educational (schools, colleges, universities) use only.
USBDLM can for newly attached USB drives
* check if the letter is used by a network share of the currently logged on user and assign the next letter that is really available
* reserve letters, so they are not used for local drives
* assign a letter from a list of new default letters, also dependent on many different criteria as the active user, drive type, connection (USB, FireWire), USB port, volume label, size and others
* assign letters for a specific USB drive by putting an INI file on the drive
* remove the drive letters of card readers until a card is inserted
* show a balloon tip with the assigned drive letter(s)
* define autorun events depending on many different criteria
* many other things, see help file, available online as HTML version too
All functions are applied to USB drives at the moment they are being attached, when the USBDLM service starts up and when a user logs on.
USBDLM runs as Win32 service under Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista. 64 Bit versions are untested but should work too.
Not free memory consumed this time
Best regards
Cyke64 (freeware fanatics !)
Amigos/As:
Mejor Imposible . . .
PURA VIDA . . .
WOOT . . .
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“no info on Vista”
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Works just fine on my 64-bit Vista machine. And, I ~love~ this applet ! Run it on start-up.
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The PC Rat
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Hello
on my hp with win 7 32bit it takes only from 900K to 1800K of memory so its good deal for function with i cant live without after work on linux and osx, but if it takes up to 18mb its not so bad too because win7 has a few services takes more and doing anything at all.