Add shortcuts on your desktop automatically when inserting drives or media with Desk Drive

Overview:

Desk Drive™ solves a really annoying problem. You pop a USB thumb drive or DVD into your computer and then you have to open Window’s Explorer and find the mapped drive or folder. Desk Drive adds a desktop icon pointing to the drive automatically. Remove the media and the shortcut goes away. Brilliantly simple and effective.

Desk Drive sits quietly in the system tray. Configuration image at right is just a click away and allows you to specify which types of media to monitor. So simple, it just works. Download it today!

System Requirements:

Windows XP/Vista

.Net Framework 2.0

Review:

So one of the cool things that ubuntu had over windows when i tried it was something so simple like adding a shortcut to a recently inserted media like a CDROM or pendrive, it made knowing what stuff you had inserted in your PC very easy and in addition you could access your stuff without opening the ubuntu explorer. Anyway this functionality can be replicated in windows by using desk drive, it will sit on the system tray and will add a shortcut to whatever stuff you insert in your PC , these shortcuts will disappear once you remove whatever you have put in, you can choose with drives will be monitored and btw i suggest you remove your floppy drive otherwise desk drive will search for inserted floppies constantly which will cause a constant and annoying sound, at least that is what happened to me. In my system desk drive used between 10MB to 20MB which is ok i guess for those rich people that have like a gig of ram and more (yes i am bitter because i only 256MB, oh wait i mean 224MB after you subtract the shared memory that the integrated video uses….i hate my PC).
So in conclusion use desk drive if you feel interested in having a shortcut for every media that you inserted. Available for Windows XP/Vista.

Get at it http://blueonionsoftware.com/DeskDrive.aspx

Automatically change your wallpaper with WallPaper Master

Overview:

Wallpaper Master is a powerful and highly customizable desktop wallpaper manager and cycler.

It will automatically change your background wallpaper with a huge range of options, and is great for indexing large collections of personal photos or any kind of image.

You can create your own categories using images on your computer, and it will cycle through your images automatically in whatever order you specify: in a shuffle mode, listed order, or based on your personal ratings. The program also has auto-size options to make sure your images are displayed with optimal size.

Features:

• Store multiple wallpaper lists as different categories/libraries – up to 5000 images per category!
• The ability to rate wallpaper, so better wallpapers are chosen more often.
• Customizable Global Hotkeys – Quickly change/clear the wallpaper with any key combo.
• Very high quality resizing of images to fit the screen optimally and keep their aspect ratio.
• Auto change the wallpaper when windows starts, every x minutes, or use the ratings to choose an interval.
• Change wallpaper in order, in shuffle mode, or randomly according to rating.
• Analyse the wallpaper and automatically choose between Resize, Tile, Center or Stretch.
• Uses very little resources.
• Minimises to tray area for easy access.
• Easy to use but powerful interface.
• Desktop Wallpaper Master is a free download (freeware)!
• And more!

Review:

Looking always at the same old desktop wallpaper can get boring very fast. WallPaper master fixes this problem with lots of options. with this program you can select up to 5000 pictures per category and automatically choose one of them as your wallpaper,you can do this by random order or by ratings which is handy in making your favorite wallpapers show up more frequently.
WallPaper Master has a lot of features but the most useful is the “auto resize wallpaper” that will shrink a picture to make it fit into the screen if its too big or tile it if it is too small. This program uses between 10 to 11MB of RAM in my system which is a little high for my taste.Unfortunately WallPaper Master only supports JPG and GIF files which is a pretty small selection. also it doesn’t support vista which is a shame for some of you and the development has stopped in favor of the Pro version. still this is a good wallpaper changer with some neat features. Available for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP.

Get it at http://jamesgart.com/wallpaperchanger/