Right, so my apologies for the last post being short. Throbbing late night migraines tend to do that to me, but hey.
By now, you've probably heard a good many folks proclaim that "Windows 7 Sucks Less". Considering that the bar had been buried several feet below ground, it wasn't really a huge effort to surpass. In reality, however, it still sucks, particularly if you've used a previous version of Windows. Ever. (teach YOU to be a repeat customer, they will.) In the sake of "improving user experiences" a good deal of things have been "optimized" with the both the benefits of "not having asked you first" or "give you the opportunity to 'de-optimize' them". Rather than put up with crap like semi-transparent windows that do nothing more than provide some User Experience Designer (who probably has a mac) a way to use the pretty GPU and run down your battery just that much faster, there are other options to get Win7 lean and mean the way that works for you. Here's a quick list of things i've done to generally improve things.
The display on my portable brain 14" acer 4810TZ is 1366×768. That means each of the default 64×64 (plus boundry areas) icons eat up around 7% of my screen. Fortunately, while i still need reading glasses, my eyesight is still in the 20/60 range allowing me the ability to discern quite a bit smaller than that. So, while i'm sure the fine grained detail that went into rendering Europe on the globe in the network icon is truly stunning, i could care less. It's a launch token. Same with title bars menus and other bits. So, screw the "sexy" that's the equivalent of inflatable tits and 1980's power hair and let's get this pig more in line with being usable.
Let's start from the bottom up, shall we? If you haven't done so already, right click on the background and pick "Personalize". Then pick a non aero theme. i prefer "Windows Classic" with a bit of extra color tweaking. We'll get to that. For now, just select it and lose the bloaty transparent crap. Now, let's put the other visual elements on a diet. Look for the control at the bottom that says "Window Color", click it. And look, there's your old friend Display Properties. Oh, how i've missed you. Here you can tweak your display settings as appropriate. Here's what i've got (i use Leelawadee because i found it had the right amount of spacing for me. Feel free to substitute your own font preference. Everything is reduced to the point just before you start losing pixels on text and control box icons.) You should notice a good deal of screen space suddenly opening up with no real loss of information. You should also notice some "helpful icons" that are too friggin' big like the "refresh" icon in the Explorer address bar and the hard-coded light up back/forward buttons. Sadly, not much you can do about those right now.
Right click the Start Button and pick "Properties", then check [x] Use small icons. i also prefer task bar buttons to combine when full. Actually, no i don't. i really prefer to have windows individual objects so i know how many i have open and can switch to them quickly. i also like having virtual desktops that allow me to segregate my work into collections, but neither of those are options under the stock Win7 install so "Combine when Full" is as good as i'm going to get right now. Apply those and watch as your menus shrink to reasonable sizes. i will note that one very nice thing about new versions of the start menu is that search box at the bottom. It's command completion for windows and saves a lot of time searching around for the right startup icon to hit. Nearly makes up for it's Godzilla like size.
You may also want to modify the Notification Area (was: System Tray) and do things like Turn "Action Center" off since you don't like to be continually reminded that Yes you turned User Access Controls off because you didn't like Clippy back when he was working as a Word Plugin either. Sadly, i've not found a way to remove the "Show Desktop" icon from beside the clock which is annoying because i have no problem remembering that "WinKey"+D does that trick, no mouse required. As an unfortunate side note, a good many of the applications that once used the WinKey (and yes, i call it that precisely because it's both wrong and annoys the inventor) have been overtaken by non-overridable windows commands you'll never remember/never knew about. This means that a number of commands you both do remember and knew about will no longer work like you expect.
A few other things you may want to do:
1. "Unpin" apps from the task bar by right clicking on the icon and choosing "unpin". Sadly, shortcuts are gone forever. However you can "pin" apps to the start menu meaning you can put things like Firefox, Thunderbird and Putty at the top of your start menu. If you can't "unpin" an app for whatever reason, go to:
"%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar" and nuke it there. yay.
2. Install Cygwin and add the cygwin bin directory to your path. You'll love me forever if you do this because it will add the unix bash commands to cmd.
3. Go into your Control Panel, and look for where it says "View by: Categories v" (top right of the pane). Change this to "small icons". For extra bonus points, Customize your Start menu, and set Control Panel to display as a Menu.
4. Install VirtuaWin. It's a free virtual desktop app. Just be aware that "WinKey"+[arrow] isn't capturable under windows 7 for some inane reason. Ctrl+WinKey+[arrow] works fine though.
One note of warning:
Looks like Win7 has changed how it authenticates to Samba. If you need Samba to talk to remote servers, hold off upgrading for a bit until this gets addressed.
Yeah, helps if i update the smbpasswd file on the linux host i recently upgraded as well. (d'oh) Proceed with updates as you will.
