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Looking for some ideas for customizing my desktop
Organichu
poopspeesRegistered User regular
poopspeesRegistered User regular
Hey guys. I just got a new laptop (and am exposed to Vista for the first time). Previously I didn't worry much about gadgets or applications or anything that might make the UI more efficient and helpful. I just used a quicklaunch bar with minimal desktop icons. I have enough RAM now, though, and an OS bundled with a widget bar, to consider customizing my desktop. I guess what I'm looking for is a program to make my laptop more informative and feature packed with minimal effort. I know about Window Blinds and stardock... I used those at times on my XP machine but got kind of sick of how ambivalent I was and how often I changed it up.
What do you guys do? Simple bottom-hugging start bar with no dock or widgets? Or if you're into heavier background customization, what are some 'essential' programs and useful little tools?
One specific widget I'm looking for is something that would beep subtly whenever major news comes about. I don't necessarily want to find out about the most recent Yankees game- I'd just like to be able to be alerted (without checking manually) whenever something serious happens like a major earthquake in Europe or an assassination attempt or a White House scandal etc. I don't really watch TV so I try to use my computer as a news outlet and something like this would be helpful without the tons of superfluous, unimportant news bits that are mentioned with most news feeds.
What do you guys do? Simple bottom-hugging start bar with no dock or widgets? Or if you're into heavier background customization, what are some 'essential' programs and useful little tools?
One specific widget I'm looking for is something that would beep subtly whenever major news comes about. I don't necessarily want to find out about the most recent Yankees game- I'd just like to be able to be alerted (without checking manually) whenever something serious happens like a major earthquake in Europe or an assassination attempt or a White House scandal etc. I don't really watch TV so I try to use my computer as a news outlet and something like this would be helpful without the tons of superfluous, unimportant news bits that are mentioned with most news feeds.
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BREAKING MT. DEW NASCAR ALERT!: CONDOLEEZA RICE PREFERS SPAGHETTI OVER MACARONI
But there is a Firefox add on that will display the current Terror Alert level in the bottom right corner of your browser.
Hah, your sarcasm actually illuminates something I should have said: I'm looking for something that will only alert me rarely. After all, 'major' news is indeed rare.
This is where I'm 'standing' thus far, with stuff acquired, themes etc.:
I still haven't found a newsfeed thing that does exactly what I want, but so far I've got a couple of useful ones, I luckily discovered a larger version of my old wallpaper, and I've got a couple of hundred songs on here by now.
From there, changed my quicklaunch bar to only have Firefox/Thunderbird/Winamp.
Finally, I removed 90% of the desktop shortcuts. The more and more I get used to the new start menu in Vista (which is amazing -- I vastly prefer being able to quickly mash the windows key and type in the name of the program I want to run over mousing over/clicking icons), the less and less useful desktop shortcuts become.
I guess I'm going towards a rather minimal approach.
Be careful... this becomes a crutch.
If you ever jump back to an XP machine, or hop on OS X, you'll find yourself typing program or file names constantly, to no effect.
I also keep my taskbar at the top; as an English speaker, starting at the top right makes sense.
Also, did the 'one level up' button completely disappear in Vista?
Oh, yeah, I'm well aware. I work on OS X and Server 2003 quite often, and they both feel really slow to navigate with compared to Vista. But, I can cope with it.
EDIT:
They reworked it a bit and merged it into the line for the filename. Press on the arrow next to how far out you want to go on the file window, or directly on the bit you want to go out to.
Hit backspace or just click on the "breadcrumb" option that happens to be one level up in the explorer address bar.
I work for MS. In all honesty, we didn't deploy Vista until about August of this year. We use web apps that wouldn't work on it, so we stuck with XP.
It was painful once I got used to the "start + type" nature of Vista... I don't think I could realistically use any OS, at this point, that doesn't provide literal instant searching. I don't even pay attention to where files are saved anymore. There's no reason to, as long as I use consistent naming schemes.
Any chance I could get that wallpaper clean?
It's really nice.
It's actually the very first 'large images only' result in GIS for 'piano'. Glad you like it- I've had it for a while.
Thanks for the tips about the level up thing, guys. Any other ideas?
This may make your boot and wake-up times much, much faster.
I've found most of the stuff on there, other than Windows services, will end up starting when you manually do so (like Adobe's updater, when you use a PDF). I have found a few, like my laptop's touchpad tool, that absolutely need to start at boot.
Overall, a pretty useful tool though.
Hah, thanks, awesome!!!
The system did some Windows updates during my last session and after running defender, my reboot time was the same as my last time- but this new time included the twenty second 'system is now configuring recent Windows updates' screen.
Thanks a bunch.
I'd argue it's even better than the Vista start menu btw, because it has keywords and plugins which Vista's start menu does not, and sorts/prioritizes better, as well as having a better editable list.
But anyways, now back to your regularly scheduled thread.
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
You really gotta give it a chance..... ....before you start hating it.
I'm actually not even kidding. We had it on the machines at work, for my summer job. The first few days, I was really loving it. Nice visual polish, sizable thumbnails, windows go whoosh, "yay it's so nice ^_^" I told myself.
By the end of the four months, I wanted to shoot myself every time I opened my computer, did something on the network, moved a large file, burned a CD, opened a file with a non-program associated file extension, tried to search for anything obscure in the new control panel, oh god, the list goes on and on.
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
Launchy is better than Vista's start bar, and was built to give Windows users an alternative to QuickSilver on OS X (which is even better), so it's not like you're really harming yourself by switching to a keyboard-based program launcher. Gnome has Deskbar Applet on Linux, or you could just use Alt+F2 or a Terminal window. I'm pretty sure there are equivalents for KDE and others, but deskbar applet seems to be pretty popular and well made. I haven't used an icon to launch something on any OS in months, and I'd like to keep it that way.
For your "major news" thing, it sounds like you just want an RSS reader that aggregates a feed that isn't going to bother you unless something big happens. I'm not sure of the best way to do this, maybe a CNN/BBC front page news RSS feed, fed through Yahoo Pipes to filter out extraneous stories, which you could then set up in something like FeedReader, or the Vista Sidebar, or even a bookmark in IE7 or Firefox. Up to you, really.
It's funny, really. When I used XP, I used to customize it until it bled. When I switched to Vista Ultimate, I haven't really felt the need to change anything. I threw my favourite wallpaper in there, but that was it. I have finally gotten used to the Start Menu now and only have 4 desktop (default) icons.
Not that Vista is perfect or anything. It absolutely has it's share of quirks and oddities, but it's nowhere near as scary now as it used to be. All in all, it feels pretty comfortable, both for general work and gaming, which surprised me, because my computer is pretty old now.