Is there an app for windows that accomplishes the same thing as the Mac disk mounter that shows up on the desktop?

When you mount such a device on Windows it shows up on ‘My Computer’ rather than the desktop. But that’s just Windows. I suppose there’s an advantage of showing it on the desktop, but probably not worth writing an App to make it happen. Is this device on the desktop thing a Mac thing?

The closest thing that you can do without an app is create a shortcut on the desktop, but that gives no indication as to state.

I have never heard of an app that will show mounted disks on a windows desktop. This probably stems from the fact that windows stands alone in that volumes are drive-based, versus other OSs Mac, linux, which have real support for disk images (must be added with ext. tool such as Daemon Tools for FS use under windows).

This means that Windows can assume knowledge of a volume (or volume-to-be), because the drives you see in My Computer are the placeholders for mounting. Seeing as how windows will only mount a disk to a drive (virtual or otherwise), I would recommend trying to emulate the functionality of My Computer on your desktop.

To do this, I would look for 2 apps. One to get rid of the arrow indicator on the shortcuts of all of the drives you will use on the desktop (unless you don’t care about the arrow…). Then get an app to monitor the state of either the icon or the drive itself so that it can update the icon for the shortcut when a drive mounts a disk.

The other thing you could look into is to script the creation/deletion of a shortcut on your desktop on mount/unmount of a disk…

Depending on your version of windows you can recreate my computer on the desktop or the quick launch bar.
If you right-click your task bar you can select “toolbars” then “new toolbar” and then select My computer/computer and then ok. Right click it and remove the tick box next to labels and title and you should have little icons for each of your HDD/CD drives. They update with the state of the drive so if you put in a disc the icon changes and If you hover over them they say what the drive letter/label is and how much space is left. I used to love this for seeing if I was running low on disc space or quick access to my local and network drives. You can shrink the space you give to the my computer bar on your task bar (right click and make sure lock the task bar is not ticked) and any icons that don’t fit will expand upwards when you click the little arrow to the right of the bar – just like the quick lauch bar. You can then drag this bar out of the task bar if you want and leave it on your desktop or even set it to “always on top”.

Let me know if the instructions weren’t clear or you need more help.

Just worked some magic with Google.

The app you want is here.

I, too, am going to install it. The default Windows behavior is annoying as crap…

I second Desktop Media. Using it all the time. While you are at it, install DirectFolders and Texter as well and never ever go back!