Home Drive Quota on Desktop Wallpaper

[skoota]

Dear All,

 

Long time reader of edugeek (which has provided me with great help in the past) but first time poster. Hopefully this is an easy question to address or someone can point me in the right direction.

 

I am currently building a new SOE image for my K-12 school, to be deployed before the commencement of the 2010 school year. There are some little improvements I would like to make to this SOE image. In particular, at other schools I have seen that a user's remaining home ( H: ) drive quota can be displayed on the desktop wallpaper (presumably via Active Desktop). This would be very helpful, as often the students have trouble figuring out how much quota they have left.

 

I was hoping that someone could provide some tips on how to get this information and then insert it into the wallpaper (which I assume would actually be a semi-dynamically generated web page displayed as wallpaper using Active Desktop).

 

We are running Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition with Windows XP Professional SP3 on the desktop machines.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[computer_expert]

BGinfo?

 

and Welcome to the Forums

[skoota]

BGinfo?

 

and Welcome to the Forums

Hi computer_expert,

 

I had a look at BGinfo but there are two problems with this approach:

 

1. The H drive space remaining will only update when the user logs-off and logs back on. The systems which I have seen refresh this information around every minute so it maintains a (fairly) real-time account of the remaining quota.
   
2. BGinfo limits where the information can appear. In the other systems the quota has appeared next to a nice Windows-like disk drive icon, making it look a bit better than just pure text.
   

 

I am thinking that in the other systems I have seen the quota may be appearing within an IFRAME on the main wallpaper page, so just this IFRAME needs to be reloaded every minute to refresh the information. I have no real issues creating such a page with IFRAME per-se, but am just unsure how to get the information (i.e. remaining disk quota) in the first place to insert into the page.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[maf_001]

Hi Matt,

 

Unfortunatly i dont know a way to display the Quota on the desktop, but I do have a nice VBS script that I used to place on the sutdents Desktop that caluculated all the folders in the H:\ and the sizes and outputed it to a Excel file in the H:\

 

The students can then see how much room each folder is using and the total size that thier H:\

 

I know it is not the best soulution, but if you cannot get a another way let me know and I will give you teh VBS script.

 

Mark

[computer_expert]

[*]The H drive space remaining will only update when the user logs-off and logs back on. The systems which I have seen refresh this information around every minute so it maintains a (fairly) real-time account of the remaining quota.

 

What about running a scheduled task to run bginfo every few minutes to regenerate the wallpaper and display the refreshed details?

[srochford]

What about running a scheduled task to run bginfo every few minutes to regenerate the wallpaper and display the refreshed details?

 

that's a good idea actually.

 

Scheduled tasks have to run under an account but it won't be the logged on user. If you were just querying something on the local machine that's no problem - there are WMI calls which will tell you who is logged on and let you get info about their folders on the local machine but I'm not sure if you can get info about remote folders.

 

I'd guess you could spawn a task as you log on which runs in the background and every x minutes does the necessary.