Towey Desktop Buddy

There are loads of desktop enhancements you can grab over the web, some of which are for entertainment, others for aesthetic enhancements, while some even bring their own function sets. For instance, Towey Desktop Buddy can sit on your desktop to inform about disk space, battery power, and time.

You’re first taken through a setup process to make sure the application perfectly integrates into your system to provide clean functionality. Launching it takes a little while until all details are read from your computer, after which the main window shows up with everything it managed to get ahold of.

Unfortunately, the window shows up in a fixed position, and if your screen resolution is too large, this means you’re stuck with a pretty large info panel right in the middle of the screen. This isn’t the issue though, but it’s configured to stay on top of everything else, so you immediately lose focus of every window which collides with its space. Moreover, you can’t manually configure window layer priority, or focus shifting.

If you manage to keep it under control, it does manage to show a decent amount of details. On the one hand, hard drive info lets you know how much free space there’s left, the used amount, as well as the total size. Sadly, the application only reads fixed drives, so you can’t monitor USB flash drives plugged in.

Apart from disk info, there’s a dedicated area which displays the current battery status, and there’s also the system time. Overall window transparency is adjusted through a slider. Last but not least, your computer can be turned off, restarted, or simply logged off the current user at the press of a button. Be sure to save your work when handling power options.

Taking everything into account, Towey Desktop Buddy comes with good intentions, but it stubbornly takes up a specific desktop position, and the large window size steals focus from any window attempting to collide with it, which easily becomes frustrating. More than this, the amount of details provided doesn’t compensate for this inconvenience.