Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware
Simple, Free Drive Space Monitoring With Tray Disk Free
by Lee Mathews Sep 26th 2008
The 29k Windows only app goes resident in your system after launching and monitors the free space of any drive on your system. You'll barely notice the 1mb of ram it consumes.
Click the tray icon and Tray Disk opens its main window behind your other apps. Its taskbar button gives you a full display of free bytes on your drive and a percentage of total drive space.
Tray Disk supports command line arguments that allow you specify the drive to monitor, color of the display bar, and the number of seconds between updates. You can spawn multiple instances to keep tabs on other drives. It works well in the system tray but overwhelming on your taskbar. I'm guessing that the tray indicator will provide enough detail for most users.
Tray Disk is released under the GPL, and is for Windows only. Vista users will need to drop MSVBVM50.dll in the same folder as Tray Disk's executable.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jash Sayani said 1:04PM on 9-26-2008
A Perfectly useless tool. Why would anyone get the Free disk space indicator in system tray and keep monitoring it. ?!?!?!?
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Lee Mathews said 1:05PM on 9-26-2008
I have been zinged, and I love it!
Some people love (and I mean LOVE) to know how much space is left on their drive. CONSTANTLY. Go figure.
Jacques Boudreau said 6:38PM on 10-01-2008
Jash, this utility is actually very useful if you intend to capture or rip a huge file (from, say, a video cam or a personal DVD) and you want to know at a glance which hard drive(s) has room for it before you lunch an application that could crash much later due to lack of space. It is faster to glance at the task bar monitor than having to open the My Computer icon and checking the property of (or hovering over) individual HDD icons. Like all such utilities, it becomes useful when it saves steps in an operatrion that you perform frequently.
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Jacques Boudreau said 7:14PM on 10-01-2008
That utility does a decent job and is free, but it still has a number of bugs that limit its usefulness:
- You can launch multiple instances to monitor multiple drives, but there is no indication as to which task bar icon corresponds to which drive. If you want to, say, display the C drive icon before (to the left of) the D drive icon, you must launch the D drive instance before C
- The command-line option to select color pairs does not work as described. It accepts only one character after "%", not two. Furthermore, the selected color is ignored. Basically, you only get a light gray/dark gray bar if you specify any color, and a default green/gray bar if you don't specify any color
- The left side of the bar represents the free space and the right side of the bar represents the used space. This is counter-intuitive, as a disk drive is usually visualized as filling up from left to right
- The numerical display of free space contains a useless leading zero that only makes it harder to interpret. For example, 37GB is displayed as "037" instead of simply "37"
- The reported free space does not include a unit. For example, a 37GB-free hard disk is reported as "037" whereas a 1MB-free floppy disk is reported as "001." I assume that if my hard disk had only 60MB free, it would be reported as "060," which could be ambiguously interpreted as 60GB. Things might get even more confusing with terabyte drives
- When you terminate the applicatrion (right-click the task bar icon and select Quit) you frequently get a useless error message (Run-time error '53': File not found).
I hope the author can correct those issues. In the mean time, though, that utility is still useful for certain applications, and it is better than many others.
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