Add Text, Or Info About Your PC, To Your Desktop [1]

As part of my day job, I look after around 15 Windows servers. They are all in a remote datacenter so I rarely have physical access to them. Instead, I log into them remotely. Which means that, when I'm looking at a Windows desktop on my computer, it could actually be any of 16 different machines, and I could be logged into those machines as a variety of users.

To help avoid confusion, I use a brilliant freeware product from Sysinternals (owned by Microsoft) called BG Info. When you run it, it writes some additional text to your Windows desktop background, and this can include things such as the PC name, its IP address, the account under which you're logged in, and so on. I run this automatically on startup on all of my servers, so I always know which machine I'm connected to simply by looking at the text on the desktop.

BG Info also lets you add any other text that you wish. So you can, if you wish, use it for reminders too. Just run the program, type in the text you want, and it's added to your default background image. It'll stay there between reboots too. To change it, just run BG Info again.

BG Info is free, and a tiny download of around 0.4 MB. It's virus-free, and runs on all recent versions of Windows. You can get it from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897557.aspx [3]