desk drive.pngarrow Windows Windows only arrow
One of the features that Mac and Linux users alike are accustomed to is having shortcuts to any connected drives sitting on their desktop. It provides a quick and painless way for you to access USB drives, memory cards, cameras, and anything else that you connect to your computer.

Windows users can get the shortcuts on their desktop as well with a handy little application called Desk Drive (from the same people who created FreeSnap). With it you can automatically add desktop shortcuts for any external devices and media, including networked locations. You can also specify drive letters that you want to be excluded.

This is really a feature that you’ll either love or hate. Personally I like keeping my desktop as tidy as possible, and don’t place many shortcuts on it. If you frequently access an external drive this could be useful to you, but for me it’s just added clutter.

The only bad thing is that Desk Drive always needs to be running in order for it to work. It stays tucked away in the System Tray, but it does eat about 12MB of memory while running. Not a whole lot, but enough to make you think twice about using it. You might be better suited to just create shortcuts to your drives the old fashioned way, but that doesn’t work so well if you have multiple devices that always get assigned different drive letters.

Desk Drive [via Freeware Genius]

  1. I wonder why you didn’t see Desktop Media, also on Freeware Genius.
    [freewaregenius.com]
    Related is USB Disc Ejector [quick.mixnmojo.com]

  2. Hmmm. You can just drag and create shortcuts to your desktop or quicklaunch bar or wherever for these drives in any version of Windows. I have permanent shortcuts created this way for a number of removable media (portable hard drive, usb flash drive) on my Quicklaunch bar (in Windows Vista and in XP. No need for this other program.

  3. FredThompson wrote:
    I wonder why you didn’t see Desktop Media, also on Freeware Genius.
    [freewaregenius.com]
    Related is USB Disc Ejector [quick.mixnmojo.com]

    I don’t see everything on every site… we go through thousands of feed items everyday so some things get past my radar. :roll:

    thorbeast wrote:
    Hmmm. You can just drag and create shortcuts to your desktop or quicklaunch bar or wherever for these drives in any version of Windows. I have permanent shortcuts created this way for a number of removable media (portable hard drive, usb flash drive) on my Quicklaunch bar (in Windows Vista and in XP. No need for this other program.

    True, but some people have problems where the drives they attach to Windows are assigned different drive letters. This would compensate for that problem.

  4. Bah, I think the whole desktop idea is counter productive anyway, since you need to minimize everything in order to get to it. I recently stopped using it, as well as the quick launch on the taskbar. I think the Vista start menu has obsoleted them both.

  5. What bugs me about this piece of software is that it scans your floppy drive every few seconds. I don’t want to have to hear my floppy drive get scanned twenty times a minute. Of course you could disable the floppy scanning feature, but where’s the sense in that? It’s a cool concept though. :)

  6. Ian Cammarata wrote:
    Bah, I think the whole desktop idea is counter productive anyway, since you need to minimize everything in order to get to it. I recently stopped using it, as well as the quick launch on the taskbar. I think the Vista start menu has obsoleted them both.

    Having to minimize everything is one of the reasons I never made much use of my desktop, and I was never really a fan of using the “show desktop” shortcut.

    Pieter wrote:
    What bugs me about this piece of software is that it scans your floppy drive every few seconds. I don’t want to have to hear my floppy drive get scanned twenty times a minute. Of course you could disable the floppy scanning feature, but where’s the sense in that? It’s a cool concept though. :)

    I didn’t think about that since I haven’t had a floppy drive in a computer for about 7 years. I could see how that would be annoying though.