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
