DriveMon v1.0 January 27, 1994 Richard Franklin Albury Songdog Software 1124 Toppe Ridge Court Raleigh, NC 27615-6039 CompuServe ID: 76477,534 Internet: 76477,534@compuserve.com America Online: Developer What is DriveMon? ----------------- DriveMon is a simple, nonintrusive little utility which monitors free disk space in Windows 3.1. DriveMon can easily be configured to alert you when free disk space drops too low, permitting you to save your work before problems occur. Best of all, DriveMon is free, relieving you of the annoyance of nag screens and the guilt of unregistered shareware. How does it work? ----------------- DriveMon has been designed to work like Clock in Windows 3.1. You can iconize the program and still get information, you can hide the title bar for a cleaner look, you can set the colors, etc. Unlike Clock, however, you can run more than one copy of DriveMon. For this reason, DriveMon doesn't save its window location. Otherwise, each new copy you started would come up over any existing copies. What's on the system menu? -------------------------- o Always on top allows you to keep DriveMon "floating" above other windows, much like Clock does. This is most useful when DriveMon is iconized. What's on the "Settings" menu? ------------------------------ o "Select drive..." allows you select which drive you want DriveMon to monitor. DriveMon will only display a list of local and remote (networked) drives. It didn't make sense to monitor removable (floppy) drives. o "No Title" removes the menu bar and the title bar from the window. Double-clicking on the window or pressing the Escape key allows you to toggle between states (this behavior was slavishly copied from Clock). With the title bar gone, mouse users can still size the window, and the window can be moved by dragging the window contents. Keyboard users, however, will have to hit Escape to get the title bar back and use the system menu to size or move the window. o "Set alarm..." brings up a dialog for setting alarm options. The threshold value - the value at or above which the alarm goes off - can be set as high as 99% or as low as 1%, but the default value of 95% seems a good number. DriveMon can be set to beep and/or flash when the alarm is triggered, but if this annoys you, you can disable it at your own risk. o "Set color..." brings up a dialog for setting the gauge color for the drive you're currently monitoring. If the default gauge color - pure red - doesn't appeal to you, you can set it to whatever color you like. What's on the "Help" menu? -------------------------- o About... is the usual shameless blurb. How (and why) do I run more than one copy of DriveMon? ------------------------------------------------------ DriveMon will either read its configuration file when it starts or use default settings if the file doesn't exist. This scheme obviously doesn't lend itself to running different configurations simultaneously, so DriveMon supports command line arguments. DriveMon monitors the drive it's on by default, but a command line argument of a drive letter such as D: or Z: can be used to force DriveMon to monitor that drive. The case of the drive letter doesn't matter, but the colon has to be present, and an invalid (nonexistent or removable) drive letter will result in a warning. How do I install DriveMon? -------------------------- The installation procedure is extremely simple: copy the executable to a convenient location, create a program item - an icon, in English - for DriveMon in Program Manager (or whatever shell you use), and you're done. In my case, I have two icons of DriveMon in my Startup group, one for the my local drive C: and one for my network drive G:. In most cases, however, a single icon in the Startup group is sufficient. How do I get rid of it? ----------------------- If you're really sure you don't like DriveMon - although I can't imagine why! :) - the "deinstallation" procedure is also extremely simple: delete the Program Manager icon, delete the DriveMon executable drivemon.exe, and delete the DriveMon initialization file drivemon.ini in your Windows directory. Who helped you? --------------- I wrote this program by myself. Honestly! I did base DriveMon on my ResGauge utility, and all the credits for ResGauge apply here as well: o Anthony W. Rairden for the USER/GDI/Both options and the alarm threshold idea o Greg Saddler for the Always on top option o Edward Bauman for the color configuration idea o David Hoos for the no-float/flash fix, some coding suggestions, and the correct spelling of "threshold" :) o Larry LaBella for displaying both USER and GDI data o Charlie Wathen for putting the code back in to bring the window up when the alarm goes off o Juan M. Aguirregabiria and Julio Pons in the January 1994 "Windows/DOS Developer's Journal" for their letter about how to drag a window by its contents Aren't you done yet? -------------------- Almost. I'd like to say in closing that if you have any comments, kudos, complaints, or suggestions, I'd like to hear them. If you have any ideas for any other utilities you'd like to see, please let me know: I'd love to see them. Version history --------------- 1.0 initial release