Solo Technology

I’m a huge fan of Dropbox, it has become a very important part of how I work on multiple machines. Honest, I love it.

With that out of the way, I have to admit that there’s one aspect that drives me absolutely nuts. It seems Dropbox just isn’t happy unless it is notifiying me of every updated file(s) – in real time. Since I have several machines syncing and I’m usually in front of at least two, I see stuff like this a lot:

I run a lot of stuff out of the shared Dropbox folders (utilities and assorted portable apps) and it can get distracting with that message popping up all the time.

I’ve looked for tray options, but haven’t found any:

That shot was from my Vista machine. The XP install is exactly the same.

I recently reloaded Windows 2000 on my old Thinkpad 600e (pentium 2 power!) and installed Dropbox there as well. After the install I immediately noticed something different about the tray…

Preferences!

And hey, guess what’s in those preferences? Yep, there’s an option for “show system tray notifications” that can be unchecked.

Now why in the world can’t I do that with the Vista/XP version?

[Updated] Woops! Boy is my face red. Turns out I just need to update my client software on the Vista and XP machines!  (relevant forum thread)

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