I've setup Vista to mount all external drives as external folders. So I've set up folders under "d:\External Drives", which really are junction points, and then any time the drive is plugged in it is mounted there. This way it doesn't get a random drive letter, and my backup scripts use the same path. IMO this is a killer feature in Windows which not many are aware of.

But I have a few issues -

1. The free space shown is for the d:\ drive, which contains the junction point. As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the actual free vs used space on the drive, without going into disk management. This has caused big problems because backup programs, explorer etc have no idea there is not enough space left to copy.

2. It is not easy to tell which folder has a mounted drive. When I try to open one which is not, I get an error message. There is a slight color difference in the icons for the two, but its easy to mistake them.

3. Is there a single place which can show me all mounted volumes. Something like an explorer namespace  called "Mounted Volumes" which will then list all active reparse points.

Is there a way to make the user experience better? Are there any utilities for this (prefer freeware)?

Topic of discussion - bookmarks are not needed, all you need is a search engine!

I've invested a lot of time and effort in bookmarking any site which I find useful or interesting, and then organizing and syncing those bookmarks using various tools and online managers like del.icio.us etc. And I hardly ever use them. This is what ends up happening -

1. if its a site you visit frequently, its going to be in your browser history, or saved session in Firefox as well.
2. if its not, chances are good its a reference site. In this case you're better off using google or any social bookmarking service to find it based on what you'r elooking for.
3. A lot of the sites you've bookmarked are probably dead/moved/no longer current.

Maybe I'm the only (insane) user who has hundreds of bookmarks, yet hardly ever uses them when looking for something.

1. Do you use file syncing?
2. What do you use - program (SyncToy, SuperFlexible), service (foldershare, dropbox), or hardware (Raid 1) and across how many computers?
3. Do you prefer to have the data live only on your pc (foldershare) or in the cloud (dropbox, Live Mesh)?
4. Worth paying for?
5. Would you use it for backups? This is interesting to me because for most people, having an automated sync is a great backup strategy (compared to none), but then there are the dangers - i.e. deletes/bad data are also sync'd.

I think there is a lot of work being done in this area and a lot of scope to help make data easier to deal with for most people. As a developer I know the problem is non-trivial (multi-way sync resolution, transactional commits, differential syncs etc) yet to most users its a simple concept (keep 2 copies of my data).

Its an interesting space to watch.