Drives and USB Devices
O&O DeskInfo distinguishes three kinds of drives and displays each group separately, so you can decide exactly which ones belong on your desktop.
Drive categories​
| Category | Key | Contains |
|---|---|---|
| Local drives | LocalDrives | Internal, fixed drives. |
| Removable drives | RemovableDrives | USB sticks, memory cards and external drives. |
| Network drives | NetworkDrives | Mapped network drives. |
Each drive is shown with its drive letter, its label, its total capacity and the free space remaining, plus a fill level bar.
The fill level bar​
The bar visualises how full the drive is and changes color as space runs out:
| Fill level | Color | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| below 90 % | green | Normal |
| 90 % to below 95 % | yellow | Warning — space is getting tight |
| 95 % and above | red | Critical |
All four colors (normal, warning, critical and the bar background) can be changed in the configuration file with FillColorNormal, FillColorWarning, FillColorCritical and FillColorBackground.
Drive activity indicators​
Show drive activity in the tray menu adds a small read/write activity indicator to every drive — a software equivalent of the hard disk LED that modern PCs no longer have. Read and write activity are signalled separately, so you can tell at a glance whether a drive is being written to or only read from.
The polling interval of the activity indicators follows the update speed: 1 second in Fast mode, 2 seconds in Normal mode and 5 seconds in Slow mode.
Switching this option restarts the application because the underlying performance counters have to be re-initialised. The corresponding configuration setting is ShowDriveActivity.
The Drives only profile combines all three drive categories into a compact display without labels. Together with a corner position this turns your desktop into a permanent drive activity panel.
Unresponsive network drives​
Network drives are a classic source of hangs: if the server behind a mapped drive is unreachable, querying it can block for a long time. O&O DeskInfo queries drives in the background and marks a drive that does not answer with a cross instead of a fill level bar. The rest of the display keeps updating normally.
The drive tables are refreshed in place rather than rebuilt, so rows do not jump around and column widths stay stable even when a very long drive name appears once.
Warning about unknown USB devices​
Warn of unknown USB devices in the tray menu (disabled by default) makes O&O DeskInfo watch for newly connected USB storage devices. When a device is connected that you have not seen before, a notification appears with the device description, its capacity and the drive letters it provides.
The notification offers two answers:
| Button | Effect |
|---|---|
| Trust only once | The device is accepted for this connection. You will be asked again the next time it is plugged in. |
| Always trust | The device is remembered and never triggers a notification again. |
The rationale is simple: USB storage from an unknown source may carry malicious files. If you do not recognise a device, do not open anything on it.
Permanently trusted devices are stored in the configuration file under TrustedUSBDevices. To make a device trigger the warning again, remove its entry from that list. To reset all decisions, remove the whole element.
The corresponding configuration setting for the feature itself is ShowUnknownUSBDeviceNotification.