Vista Gadget: Presto's Hard Drive Monitor
A Vista gadget to monitor the free space on up to four hard drives.
FeedbackBy Preston Hunt, 07 November 2006

Presto's Hard Drive Monitor is a gadget for the Windows Vista sidebar. It reports the free space on up to four local or network connected hard drives. Free space is displayed both in text and graphical form.

Install gadget now (v1.55)!

(Alternate version with enhancements from Hans-Peter Ksionski. This version makes it easier to select the drives to monitor and lets you change how often the gadget is updated.)

My motivation in writing this gadget came from three sources: Foremost was TinyResmeter, a very useful tool that I have been using for some time on Windows XP. When I installed Vista, I immediately checked the gadget library for a similar tool, and discovered HDD Meter. HDD Meter delivers the same approximate functionality, but only supports one drive and, in my humble opinion, is not very efficient with its use of screen real estate -- especially if you have four drives to monitor!

Thus, I decided to write my own, modeled after HDD Meter's code. I was heavily influenced by the user interface of Multi Meter, which has a nice theme of display a horizontal bar graph next to text information. I ended up rewriting most of the HDD Meter code in order to better meet my needs, and the end result is Presto's Hard Drive Monitor.

Please contact me if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for this gadget!

P.S. Special thanks to SFkilla for the original HDD Meter idea and for allowing the use of his style and graphics!

P.P.S. Many thanks to Jim for his debugging help in writing this, my first Vista gadget. Jim also created the hard drive icon shown in the gadget control panel.

Feature Suggestions

Release History

blog comments powered by Disqus

Comments

From remove system fix virus on 2011-12-27T09:40:26Z:

This tool is really helpful! Thanks for your review so that I know it.

From Frank on 2011-07-08T13:16:16Z:

How often does it poll the disks?

From presto8 on 2011-07-08T14:55:34Z:

The gadget itself does not directly poll the disks. Windows does that and
reports the value back to the gadget. It seems to update about every 5
seconds.

From LeeH on 2010-11-08T04:43:22Z:

Re total space suggestion: I would suggest that a list of drives be used for the total space and total free space . I would not want it counting the camera, media player, or USB Flash Thumb Drive in the total available disk space.

From Neojack44 on 2010-09-18T14:25:06Z:

Pretty nice big thx !
But one feature is not here. We need a total space of all drives.

Nj.

From presto8 on 2010-09-23T01:59:31Z:

Glad you like the gadget and thanks for the feature suggestion. I'll add it to the list for future improvements!

From tony adams on 2010-01-01T21:05:00Z:

thanks will look but non of my systems are passworded - i can wander the network at will from any computer - but it may well be me that has something wrong - good to know you have it working - gives me hope that i can find the problem at my end

From presto8 on 2009-12-23T07:31:00Z:

Tony, please make sure your username and password are entered for those network shares. Often Windows will require relogin on a reboot. I use several network shares on mine and it works fine. I'm almost certain there isn't a bug in there, but anything is possible!

From tony adams on 2009-12-16T09:47:00Z:

dose not seem to work if run on 2 computers looking at the same server drives - 1 will update the other will not

From tony adams on 2009-12-13T19:54:00Z:

best hdd gadget i have found - i use it to see if 2 servers i have are online by looking to see if its found the harddrives in them - but it does not seem foolproof - occasionally it does not find the drives even though the servers are switched on - in itself that does not matter apart from i then forget to switch them off

any chance of adding a refresh button

From presto8 on 2009-02-05T04:00:00Z:

Thanks, Jason. Version 1.52 is fixed for Windows 7 now.

From Jason on 2009-01-31T18:42:00Z:

Love this app!

All you have to do to get it working in Windows 7 is to edit the file gadget.css (found in UserYourLoginAppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows SidebarGadgetsprestohdmonitor...) and add the line "width: 100%;" to the #background setting.

From Preston on 2007-03-01T00:57:00Z:

Hi Ozzy1,

Good suggestion -- I have started including version number on the settings page starting with v1.31.

Also note that for any gadget, you can click the "+" at the top of the sidebar to pull up a panel listing all available gadgets on your system. Select a gadget and then click "Show details" in the lower left hand corner. The version number will be displayed there as well. This is the official Microsoft way to do it.

From Ozzy1 on 2007-02-28T23:15:00Z:

I am finding it difficult to check the current version number. Can you put it into the options-page? So when I see 1.40, I can check what version I already have?

From SFkilla on 2007-01-06T09:53:00Z:

Thanks for the credits ;)

Very nice mod. I'm still waiting to see you on my board....come and enjoy other gadgets here....

Regards

SFkilla