Dynamic information displayed on desktop

April 18, 2007 5:35 PM

How to display system name/uptime on desktop (Windows XP/2003) ?

Hi - I'm responsible for some windows systems which use screen/keyboard switches to share one one keyboard/screen amongst multiple machines.

I would like to make it easier for users to understand what system they're looking at (not sure why this causes them so much difficulty but it does)

I've seen screendumps of Windows system in which part of the desktop displays information such as the hostname and the system uptime.

Does anyone know how this can be done in Windows XP / 2003 ?

posted by southof40 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

If you drop down to a command prompt and type:

net statistics server

You'll get something back like:

Server Statistics for \\COMPUTERNAME


Statistics since 4/12/2007 3:07 AM

It'll give you some junk after that, but the time it cites right there is basically the last time Windows was loaded. I.E. last time you rebooted.
posted by Industrial PhD at 5:53 PM on April 18, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks Industrial - but it was more the means to display the information all the time on the desktop that I was needing.
posted by southof40 at 6:00 PM on April 18, 2007

If you're an admin you'll love this lightweight (free - as in beer) program for Windows XP. It's called Samurize which is basically a display front end for all sorts of system information, not the least of which is uptime and system name (free ram, page file in use, TCP connections up/down, etc. etc. etc...)

It can be made to output to any number of formats/places, including the background of the desktop, floating text, or my personal favourite, text in the task bar beside the system tray.

Enjoy!
posted by tiamat at 6:04 PM on April 18, 2007

Best answer: Another good one is from sysinternals (now acquired my M$)

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/BgInfo.mspx

Steve
posted by bumper314 at 6:21 PM on April 18, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks bumper and tiamat. I went with BgInfo as it seemed a bit lighter weight for what I wanted than Samurize.
posted by southof40 at 7:07 PM on April 18, 2007

The thing you've seen with the hostname and version and so on at the bottom of the screen was either a beta/MSDN release or Windows Server.
posted by mendel at 7:40 PM on April 18, 2007

FYI, when I used to manage a bunch of servers remotely, I whipped up a few jpgs with the server names & used them for desktop backgrounds. Just to make sure I didn't drop files on the wrong box. Worked like a charm!
posted by Banky_Edwards at 10:22 PM on April 18, 2007