Hi.
Not sure if anyone on this forum can help me with this "idea".
As a teacher, I find alot of students forget their small flash drives in the computer lab USB ports.

What would be great is if someone could come up with a program that can run in Windows that checks all USB drives when someone logs off. If it finds one, it reports a message across the screen that says "Don't forget your flash drive".

Is this possible?

 

Yes this is possible technically. You may not even need to go into the depths of USB hardware. You can simply try to access drives. Since the USB ports for these machines likely are permanently assigned, you don't need to design it flexibly. If there is no USB stick, you will receive an error code for each drive you are trying to access.

Or you can also enumerate available USB devices.

The second thing is you need to detect shutdown of Windows in software. Of course this is somehow possible. Ask on a programming forum.

I can use Visual Studio, but would have to investigate about the details how to to this.

 

Thanks Takao,
Yes I wasn't sure if this forum dealt with this sort of topic.
I'll try a programming forum.

 

Some people here are involved into software programming. However the number of related posts is small. If you don't find a solution, you can also try on the MSDN community forum.

 

already done
http://lifehacker.com/5105401/flash-drive-reminder-makes-sure-you-dont-forget-your-thumb-drive

http://blog.premiumusb.com/2010/12/usb-tip-5-never-forget-your-usb-flash-drive-again/

and more and more
Google is your friend..

 

Would you settle for a .wav file telling something like "don't forget your pen drive" even if none is there?

That is easy to do. Select your record to play for some specific event/s.

And now you will tell me that audio should be on for that. Yes, complete happines is not easy to achieve...

 

At my last job,if you left the USB flash drive in place,the computer in my office would try to boot from it next time you turned it on.
The screen would say "non-system disc"& the PC would not start.

After a few episodes of this,I remembered to remove the flash drive.

I suppose I should have reported it to the IT guy,but I decided to "let sleeping dogs lie!"

 

Would you settle for a .wav file telling something like "don't forget your pen drive" even if none is there?

That is easy to do. Select your record to play for some specific event/s.

And now you will tell me that audio should be on for that. Yes, complete happines is not easy to achieve...

This would work, however as we have 20 computers in the room, IT tends to turn off the speakers. Students only hear sound through the phone jack.

 

At my last job,if you left the USB flash drive in place,the computer in my office would try to boot from it next time you turned it on.
The screen would say "non-system disc"& the PC would not start.

After a few episodes of this,I remembered to remove the flash drive.

I suppose I should have reported it to the IT guy,but I decided to "let sleeping dogs lie!"

Unfortunately it's the next student that will see this message. We tend to find that about 50% of USBs don't get returned - bit of a shame really the dishonesty. So it's better that it warns the students before they leave the computer room.

 

or how about displaying message triggered by computer time, say 5 min before lab ends?