When I double click on My Computer, I can immediately see the Total size and Free space for internal and external HDDs, and inserted CD/DVD media, but in the same columns I cannot see these values for any USB flash drives. They are just empty. To see, I have to right click on USB drive letter, and select Properties.
Is there a trick to make Windows XP display USB drive's Total size and Free space in My Computer window?
This is done for performance reasons. Windows XP knows nothing about the nature of a removeable disk. In some cases the media may be removed or changed and Windows will know nothing about it. This is the case with Floppy drives. It is all up to the device and it's drivers. Since the media can be changed at any time Windows can not determine the total and free space without actually reading the disk. With some devices this can take some time. This could produce a delay of several seconds (or more) every time you opened Windows explorer. To avoid these possible delays Microsoft decided not to show this information for removeable drives. In most cases there will be no work around. If one exists it would be in the properties for the device shown in Device Manager.
Source see post 4
Ok, I give a, I wish, accepted answer...
Regarding the previous comments on the question, we assume that Windows XP can't give the requested information in Mehper's question.
Snark: I suppose it's the behavior of XP not to show free space and total size on Removable Disk. Maybe because at the time XP was released, removable drives were slow and it would take a lot of time to parse them to calculate the used space. Even more on FAT where this info is not stored in the metadata but has to be calculated each time. I think it's stored in the metadata for NTFS. And the speed of removable devices has improved too.
r0ca: It's weird. I have Windows 7 as you have and I am able to format my 4go and 16go in NTFS. In that case, I'm 99% sure that have it format in NTFS would fix the issue. But if you can't afford due to Xbox, I understand ;)
Is there a trick to make Windows XP display USB drive's Total size and Free space in My Computer window?
I'm not sure of any tricks to get the size to show up on those columns, but if you want to be able to see the total sizes of the disk from My Computer, a possible workaround would be to append (or prepend, depending on your preference) the size to the name of the device.
For example, a disk named 'Work' could be renamed to 'Work(8Gb)', 'Work8G' or even '8G Work'
this won't show free space remaining, but at least lets you know how big a drive is when you use it again.
I know I'm late to the game but hopefully this will help someone that's trying to get the "total space" and "free space" parameters on Windows XP (SP3) as I was. Unless I've missed it, my Google search came up with no answers. What I tried (successfully) was to use the portable app "Explorer++" file manager from https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/explorerplusplus_portable. What a neat litte app as is so much that's on this site. I keep a USB stick with all my portable apps.....and any of them can be installed to any folder you desire on your Windows installation. I always make a folder on all of my computers labeled "My Tools". When I say "install"......it's only installed to "My Tools" folder. One last comment about the Explorer++ app.....you will have to add the "total space" and "free space" columns by right-clicking the column heading bar and selecting the desire parameter.
