I received an email from a long-time user of Uptime 2000 a couple of weeks ago. He was wondering if I knew of an application that showed a system’s IP address the same way Uptime 2000 showed your system’s up time transparently on the desktop. Turns out I didn’t have a good answer for him. His mail did however finally cause me to get around to updating the Uptime 2000 code to make it work with the latest versions of Windows. I also figured that, while I was at it, I could also add support for displaying a system’s IP address.

I wrote that app back in 2000 (back when Windows 2000 was new and slapping a “2000″ at the end of your app’s name was the in thing to do). Every now and then I get emails from folks asking for an updated version that works with UAC (it wrote to the registry in HKLM which requires elevation nowadays) so they wouldn’t have to run it as admin anymore. I figured it wouldn’t be that much work and it would be kind of fun to write some code again–it had been a while.

I dug up the old C++ code and was quickly reminded of the fact that it was actually going to be a fair amount of work (for me) to make it happen. I changed plans and instead decided to write an application in C# from scratch that would do it all and in what I figured would be a couple hours of work. That turned out to be pretty spot on as today I’m sharing out the first version of DeskTips.

Here’s a screenshot of the data it currently supports (time, date, system up time, CPU usage, computer name, and IP address):

And here’s another screenshot that shows the extent of its current UI:


It’s pretty simple and I’m hoping someone finds it useful. It’ll at the very least serve as a new place I can point the folks who still run good old Uptime 2000 but want an update.

If there’s some other information you’d find useful to add to the list of data it supports, just leave me a comment or shoot me a mail (gus at this domain) and I’ll consider adding it to an upcoming version of DeskTips.

You can read more about DeskTips and download it from its fancy product page.