Windows 7, the revenge

[ellarien]

I will say this for the Windows 7 desktop interface; it's amazingly customizable.

I doubt I'll actually keep it like this for long, but just to show how far one can go without resorting to registry hacks, have some screenshots, with commentary.

	Customizing with extreme prejudice pt 1 Desktop icons can be hidden (but en masse only). Right-click on the desktop and choose "View" and un-check "Show desktop icons."
	Customizing with Extreme Prejudice, Part 2 Just out of spite, I turned off everything in the Start Menu that can be turned off, using the Customize menu. Unfortunately, there's a limit to how far it will shrink to fit.
	Customizing with extreme prejudice, part 3 The official "All programs" menu no longer has the flyout feature, but they recycled that bit of code to allow custom "Toolbars" on the Taskbar. All I had to do was to copy all the shortcuts from the Programs menu into one place (most of them were in the c:\programdata\microsoft\windows\startmenu folder, but some were under \user\redacted\appdata\roaming; to be fair, it wasn't hard to find this out by right-clicking on items in the "official" menu) and set that as a toolbar. (Right click on taskbar, choose toolbar/new toolbar, navigate to desired folder.)
	Customizing with Extreme Prejudice, Part 4 I reject your "desktop" toolbar and substitute my own! Unfortunately those are just shortcuts, so they don't flyout. Also, this is why Libraries are evil. See that thing up there that looks like a folder window? Most of the files in it are in my personal Pictures folder, but for some reason Paint (which has sprouted a feeble version of the Office "Ribbon" interface) decided to save into the "Public" one.