Automatic Desktop Shortcuts With Desk Drive

Martin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:33:59 +0000

Desk Drive is a free software program for Windows XP and Windows Vista that solves a problem for lazy users. Whenever you pop in a removable device you need to click on Windows Explorer and then on the drive icon to access it. Desk Drive on the other hand places a Windows shortcut right on the computer desktop after the device has been connected to the operating system saving the user the few clicks and some time.

The question here is obviously if this is enough to justify running yet another background program 24/7 on the computer system. This really depends on the user in question. If you regularly add and remove removable devices and media from a computer system – talking about multiple times a day at least – then you might want to consider using the software. If you only do it once a week the software program feels like an overkill.

The feature can be enabled for CD Rom drives, removable media, fixed drives, network drives and ram drives. The application will sit quietly in the Windows System Tray and spawn a desktop shortcut immediately after one of the selected devices has been connected to the computer system. It will also remove the shortcut again if the device is disconnected from the system.

Desk Drive requires the Microsoft .net Framework and uses up to 18 Megabytes of computer memory while running. That’s a lot of memory and it should influence the decision whether to run Desk Drive or not heavily.

Tags: desk drive, removable devices, removable media, shortcuts, software, windows shortcuts, windows software

Use PStart to access your portable devices

Martin — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:05:11 +0000

PStart is a nice handy application that makes it easy to start applications or open folders on your portable devices. One of the main disadvantages of Windows is that it uses absolute paths in its shortcuts which becomes a big problem if a drive letter changes. A click on the shortcut to the portable version of Firefox would return a not found error message if the driver letter of the USB device changed after the creation of the shortcut.

The free software PStart is using relative paths instead of absolute ones which means that it can execute any applications on the device even if the driver letter changes. You can basically create a start menu for your portable applications using PStart that lists applications, sorted in groups like Internet, Games if you like, folders and other files such as documents.

All of this elements can be added by either creating a menu manually or scanning an folder or device for applications. Other features such as a search function and the ability to take notes are also included in the release. It should be noted that you can add all files, applications and folders to the menu which is an excellent way to handle CDs and DVDs as well.

I personally think that PStart is a useful application if you work regularly with removable devices. It does not make that much sense if you use them only occasionally.

Tags: portable applications, pstart, removable devices, usb

gHacks technology news » removable devices

Automatic Desktop Shortcuts With Desk Drive

Related posts

Use PStart to access your portable devices

Related posts