I am looking for a way to create instructions that pop up automatically when you pop in a usb thumb drive. I would like to display images in windows explorer, if at all possible. I am unsure whether custom icons is the way to do this, or if there is a way to inject html or alter the visuals of windows explorer into something more friendly to create a more intuitive experience for users of my little usb device.
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You said "users of my [...] device". Are you talking about distributing something? If so, maybe not... but just for your own use, if you enable Active Desktop, or use Windows 98, ME, maybe 2000, not sure about XP, you can have an HTML file that displays in the background of the folder. Hide the files and folders, and use hyperlinks, images, an image map, or whatever, and you can rig something up. It'd be a lot of work though. If they have Flash for IE (since Windows Explorer and IE share a lot) you could probably even put a Flash menu in it. Pretty sure XP has that feature disabled; as you can imagine, it would be easy to exploit.
You could write a script or something that enables Active Desktop, but this is all trivial because Microsoft plans to disable autorun/autoplay for XP, as it is in Win7, soon enough.
That makes complete sense. I will clarify though, What I am looking to do though, is have people run a group of utilities. It is crucial that they run in a certain order - and as per their wants, they may not need to run/download certain applications. It is strange, but it is for a training device more or less.
The files on the usb stick will be hyperlinks, and they will need to run certain links to assure the correct tutorials.
I would basically like to:
1 - Know if there is any way to what they are looking at? And by this, I mean, if at all possible I would like to put display my contact information on them, as a nice gesture. Being a self run contractor, I promote open source a lot, and provide some out of office support when I can, therefore I think it would be great addition. The text file clearly named help.txt, which contains my contact information, clearly doesnt do the trick. So displaying an image in Explorer: possible?
2 - Lock files from being accidentally deleted, this crops up a lot. I have seen some usb sticks with little write locks built onto their hardware - how reliable are those? Is there any way to software lock (like a small partition ) on them? I give em out for training on products offered here so people can learn about em, but I get the back deleted nearly 100% of the time. ) This is a big time concern. I am no expert at partition technology, but is there a way you can make write only fat32 partition for part of the drive, and then make a small bit in which they can drop their own information into?
3 - I would also like the ability to present the usb drive a little differently. I originally thinking the way some music CDs used to auto play with multimedia on them - minus the auto play feature, I guess. I wouldn't be worried about housing a local web if option number two was excitable, however, I am feeling that it is not really viable option. Aside from anything too fancy, just the ability to display more of a menu driven system with in windows explorer - so I dont make things too crazy for users. Mainly a resource of various things you can do to automatically "dress up" explorer a bit. Like even colors, etc. Much like you can force a wallpaper, I wonder if you can force a background image for the explorer windows they are using. Any little tricks like this would just be fun to play with, imo.
Thanks for any help, and thank you for your reply