Cool Tools Part II: BGInfo
If you work different environments (dev, test, prod) with a lot of servers (portal, publisher, collab, search), you’ve no doubt experience the problem where you’re looking at a remote window of a machine and completely forget which machine it is. Or, say, you know what the machine name is from the title bar, but you forget which system it is or what environment it’s in. If you haven’t used it already, an excellent tool is SysInternal’s BGInfo. Basically, at login, it simply generates a wallpaper for you with any static or dynamic text you’d like.
For example, you could make the wallpaper red for production machines, orange for test, and green for dev. You could include the machine name, processor information, hard drive space, IP address, and even a text description about the box (i.e., “ALUI Search Server”) so that you can tell exactly what box you’re looking at in a glance.
Setup is easy – just run the tool to configure what text and background you’d like, then add a shorcut to your startup folder. Include the /timer command line parameter (“C:\Bginfo.exe /timer:0″) to ensure that the BGInfo configuration interface doesn’t appear every time you start up, but a new wallpaper is generated.
