Windows 7 notes

[ellarien]

The version of Windows Media Player that comes with Windows 7 can play iTunes files. (What it doesn't seem to want to do is tell me what version it is. 11 or 12, I think.) The latest version on XP won't do that, and I never thought to check in Vista.

The latest version of Windows Defender doesn't appear to have the tools for messing around with services and such that earlier versions had -- just scanning and block/allow for things it thinks are suspicious. Like TightVnc, which is an essential work tool for me, and which shows up red on the taskbar even after I've allowed it. (Oddly, on the desktop it doesn't seem to have noticed it yet. Maybe it somehow silently inherited the fact that I'd allowed it in McAfee.) Windows system utilties are green and programs considered benign are blue.

I don't think it used to work like this, but when I write tags to the files in Photoshop Elements, it now does it by sending the original version to the Recycle Bin and creating a clone with the extra tags. This could get messy if disk space was tight. I still have to blow away the Windows Live Photo Gallery database and let it rebuild in order to have Gallery see the tags.

Protip from WinHelpOnline.com, which I just applied to good effect; if your icons get messed up, you can blow away the icon cache and let it rebuild.

In connection with which, I can't believe it took me two years plus to think of unhiding the Appdata folder, considering how often I go in there. (I wish Windows would let me unhide everything in individual folders instead of globally; I like to see what's going on behind my back, but the recent versions of Windows keep too many hidden files lying around on the desktop and in user folders, which make things look horribly untidy if they're visible.)

I can post to Flickr from Windows Live; I can also blog to Dreamwidth, and include Flickr images.

I dislike the new "Libraries" concept fairly intensely; just when I thought we had a fairly transparent hierarchy for the user folders, they had to go and obfuscate things again. I realize I lost the battle about who decides where things go several versions back, but it still annoys me not to have an easy way of finding out what the real path to a file is. (I use the Command Prompt a lot; after all, most of my working life is spent on the Unix/Linux command line.)

Speaking of annoyances, Windows 7 has an option to stop User Account Control from dimming the screen, while still letting it function. It's "not recommended unless your computer is very slow to dim the screen," but it's there.

I also mourn the passing of the Windows 95/98 style Start Menu, but I suppose its time had come, and it isn't entirely Microsoft's fault I clung to it for over a decade. I've mostly compensated by pinning my favorite programs to the start menu, and my most-favorite ones to the taskbar. I wonder how many people just use desktop shortcuts for everything.