How to use ToolBox - Shortcuts and Drive Monitors
You can create many different types of shortcuts in ToolBox:
- Drive shortcuts that open a drive contents in Windows Explorer,
- Folder Shortcuts for opening local or network folders in Windows Explorer,
- Application Shortcuts that can open an application, a simple file, or a folder,
- Control Panel Application Shortcuts that can open a Windows CPL (Control Panel) application
- Universal Resource Locators (aka URLs) that open your favourite web pages using a browser of your choice
You can create many different types of system monitors in ToolBox, which are clickable like shortcuts and have various properties:
- Drive Size Monitors that can show you the amount of free disk space on a particular disk at run-time and can be used to open the drive contents in Windows Explorer too.
- Windows Up-Time Monitors to display the time that Windows has been up and running. Clicking on one of those monitors brings up the System Properties dialog box (My Computer → Properties)
- Memory Commit Charge to display the amount of memory that is currently allocated (used) by the applications that are running on your system
Drive Shortcuts
Create a Drive Shortcut
Right click on an empty tile on your ToolBox window. Select 'New../Shortcut to Drive' from the popup menu (see
picture on the right).
The Icon Properties dialog will open (see Icon Properties Dialog
picture).
Select a drive letter and an Icon (you can choose to pick an icon from a different library) and click OK
to create a shortcut to a Drive (see picture on the left).
Clicking on a Drive icon, executes Windows Explorer with the correct parameter, so a window with the contents
of that drive is displayed.
Application Shortcuts
Drag & drop an executable onto ToolBox
From Windows Explorer navigate to a place where an executable (*.exe) file is on your disk. For example, if
you
want to create a shortcut to Notepad the windows default text-file editor, go to
c:\winnt where the Notepad application is. Find the notepad.exe file,
drag it and drop it onto your ToolBox window at any empty tile. This will create automatically a shortcut to
Notepad, and you can use this tile to run Notepad from now on!
Drag & drop any file onto ToolBox
If you drag a simple file, like an excel-spreadsheet for example, onto an empty Toolbox tile,
ToolBox will create a
shortcut to that file, and will pick up the correct associated icon for that file (in our example the Microsoft
Excel icon).
By clicking that tile from now on, ToolBox will try to find and then execute the associated application.
Editing Shortcut Properties
For more information on editing Properties, refer to the Icon Properties page.
Windows CPL Application Shortcuts
ToolBox will correctly recognize and identify a Windows Control Panel application when a
.cpl file
is dropped on it. You can also right-click on an empty tile and select New → Shortcut to Control Panel
Application
from the pop-up menu.
This option will reveal a list of the Control Panel applications found in your Windows system directory
(e.g. c:\winnt\system32). Pick up one of them and press OK to create a windows CPL application shortcut.
Note, that CPL applications that do not appear in the list (like Administrative Tools → Services) are not proper CPL files. These applications are most likely to be *.msc files, i.e. Windows Management Console applications. You can create shortcut to these snipets by creating normal shortcuts to .msc files (see creating Application Shortcuts).
Drive Size Monitors
Drive Size monitors are tiles that show you the free space on a hard disk.
Before creating a drive size monitor, it is a good idea to create a new toolbox, that has rectangular tiles (80x18
pixels probably).
ToolBox's default windows have 36x36 sized tiles, which are fine when you want to accomodate simple icons, but drive
size monitors
are shown in text and need to be wider.
Create a Drive Size Monitor
Right-click on an empty tile in one of your ToolBox windows. Select New → Drive Size Monitor from the popup
menu.
Select the
drive you want to monitor from the drop-down list and press ok. A new drive size monitor will be created as shown in
the image below.
You can now change the toolbox
window's properties
and make it appear nicer and smaller. Note that the drive size monitor acts as a normal ToolBox button. The button
shown in the example,
will launch explorer and show the contents of the C: drive.
Creating a new shortcut using the pop-up menu.