One of the most powerful features of DiskView Professional Edition is the ability to customize the appearance of the Visualizer, as well as generate a variety of reports using custom XSL Stylesheets.

For a recent demo, we made a custom XSL Stylesheet for Ohio State University’s Office of Information Technology.  The design theme is based on the current website for OSU-OIT. The stylesheet completely changes the appearance of the DiskView Visualizer, generating a report in a format most suited for the department:

The same stylesheet can be used for generating and publishing static HTML reports using DiskView Professional Edition’s scripting API, and is included in the DiskView Scripting Guide as a sample. To use the custom stylesheet, all you need to do is:

1) Extract osu.xsl from the Scripting Guide zip file to some place on your disk
2) Open DiskView Options  > Advanced tab, and select the checkbox for using customized XSL stylesheet.
3) Browse to osu.xsl that you extracted earlier in Step 1. Click OK to close the dialog and browse to another folder.

Now the custom stylesheet will be used to render the Visualizer pane, and will also be used for generating the HTML reports using DiskView’s scripting API.

This is a sample we put together quickly. A person with experience in HTML and a bit of XSL should be able to modify the provided custom XSL stylesheets to make a wide variety of reports.

DiskView 3.7 brings many usability and stability improvements to DiskView.

• A custom XSL stylesheet is now included with DiskView Professional as a sample. This can be used to customize DiskView Visualizer and script-generated reports.
• Chart type selection is now persisted, and does not automatically revert to Pie chart if Bar graph or SMART was selected. Thanks Zane for the suggestion!
• Resolved stack overflow error caused when calculating file fragmentation while a rescan is in process.
• Improved the auto rescan ability when reparse points are present.
• Fixed error in calculating folder size of top-level folders during a rescan.
• Disk Temperature is now shown in Fahrenheit by default.
• Column titles for SMART disk health report have been improved to add clarity. Tooltips have been added to column titles to explain column values in more detail.

Thanks to our users for feedback and suggestions!

Microsoft security update MS06-015, released last week (April 11th) via Windows Update interfered with DiskView’s columns for Windows Explorer in addition to causing other problems.

DiskView 3.6 released today fixes the incompatability caused by this Microsoft patch. A free trial of DiskView 3.6 is available from our download page.

Alex Bezborodov of Accurate Data Recovery recently wrote the following in an independent review of DiskView:

“Few and far between are occasions when I find a piece of software that is as superb as DiskView in terms of user friendliness, efficiency, graphic interface, functionality, customization and just about everything else…” Read more

Thank you, Alex! We’re thrilled to know that you find DiskView so cool

SplitView was noticed in the blogosphere recently when Wall Street Journal columnist Jeremy Wagstaff wrote about it in his popular Loose Wire blog. Jeremy finds SplitView useful when he is on the road and wants to split his laptop’s screen in two, making it easy to drag & drop and stuff.

Charlie White at the Bleeding Edge found it useful when working with wide-screen monitors such as BenQ’s 20-inch FP202W or Dell’s 30″ beast - the 3007WFP

In the Monitors Blog, J. Angelo noted that SplitView is a great app for those into heavy dragging-and-dropping or simply comparing several documents against one another. He also noted that it’s definitely cheaper than having to purchase an additional monitor and graphics card to support your dual-view needs.

The PC Doctor soon followed with a quick review of SplitView. He found it pretty useful after having been setting up application windows like this by hand for years to make the best use of screen real estate.  Now he just need to click on a link and it’s handled.

Thanks guys!

The latest update to DiskView, version 3.5, released early this week brings several enhancements that will be well appreciated by security conscious users, system administrators, and IT managers.

This version enables installation of DiskView in multi-user mode, when the other users are running with non-administrator privileges (i.e. through limited user accounts). Users are able to see disk space distribution of only files for which they have access permissions. When running as an administrator, DiskView shows disk usage statistics for all files, including those that are normally hidden by Windows (like the System Volume Information folder). Also, DiskView is able to correctly show disk usage information for folders that belong to other users but which need backup from a central server. To achieve this, DiskView uses the backup user privilege when computing disk usage statistics. This feature is very useful for storage analysis and prediction for disk backups.

A free trial of DiskView 3.5 is available from our download page.

Tom Nelson of the Billings Gazatte is full of praises for DiskView in his “Digital Corner” article.

Tom writes:

Keeping your hard drive healthy

Whenever I install new software on my computer, I try to uninstall an already installed program that I don’t use to make room for the new software. It’s not that my hard drive is close to full. I try to keep my hard drives no more than half full. To run well, a computer needs disk space. I am being really conservative by leaving half the disk space unused — between 30 percent and 40 percent is OK. But if your hard drive has only 10 percent to 15 percent free space, it’s time to take some action.

You can easily check on how much of your hard drive space is in use. Hold down the Windows key and tap on the “e” key. Highlight the drive you want to check. Hold down the Alt key and tap on Enter. (Mouse users can highlight the drive and then right click, then click on properties.) A dialogue box will open with a pie chart that will give you a graphical representation of disk usage. The blue is used space. The odd pink color is how much space your disk is not using. The box you just opened is called the properties dialogue box. It will also tell you how much space there is on the hard drive, the file system used and some other information.

If your hard drive is over 85 percent full, you should consider uninstalling some unused software. If you have a great number of image files, you should consider putting them on CD, DVD or another hard drive.

Sometimes it is difficult to determine what is taking up so much space on a hard drive. I have a really slick program on my computer called DiskView. The software integrates with Internet Explorer. When you activate its features, it gives you a graphical view of exactly which programs are using how much space on your hard drive. It can also tell you the size of particular files and folders.You can try out the DiskView software for 15 days at no charge and find out more information at www.diskview.com.
Read the article at the Billings Gazette site…Thank you, Tom!

Thank you, Tom!

As we go to our drawing boards for the next major uphaul of DiskView, we’d like to know what you think should be in the product! Top on our list are features for power users like in-depth reporting and disk usage statistics. Also expect great improvements in the now famous user interface! As Microsoft is getting ready for Windows Vista, we are getting ready to make DiskView sing and dance on it as well.

Now is your chance to let us know what you want to see in DiskView… chances are it will be there Of course, if you buy now, you will be entitled to a free upgrade to that version per our free upgrade policy.
 

The latest update to DiskView (version 3.4) includes enhancements to the disk analysis engine and improvements to the user interface coupled with other bug-fixes. The DiskView Visualizer toolbar has been further streamlined to be in tune with user workflow. This version also includes improvements to DiskView’s disk health report for computers with multiple disks.

DiskView 3.3 is a bugfix release that resolves an incompatability with Google Desktop Search. This version also has improved performance and enhanced user experience.