Fair's fair

[ellarien]

I think I was wrong about the color scheme for the taskbar buttons; on closer inspection, it just seems to be picking up color from the icon, and that's where the angry-looking red for TightVnc was coming from.



I wouldn't lay odds against my becoming completely reconciled to Homegroup (though I currently have it disabled at the service level) or even Libraries in a couple of years. That's mostly because I don't believe in gambling, but know I do tend to be a bit of an early resister when it comes to interface changes. In the meantime, I have my DOS-prompt and Cygwin bash shell pinned to the taskbar.

On the other hand, I have just had a lengthy discussion with the navigator pane about what we call things. The Documents &c folders are still, at the DOS level, simply \user\$NAME\documents and so forth, which to my mind was the biggest single improvement in Vista over everything from Win95 on, but the Win7 interface wants to call it "My Documents" again. (To distinguish it from the "Public" documents folder which is also in the thrice-darned Documents Library.) I have, I think, convinced it otherwise as far as the appearance of my personal folder goes, but if I place a shortcut to "Documents" in the "Favorites" area of the navigation pane (which shows up as "Links" in the "Personal Folder" area of the start menu, while "Favorites" there means my internet bookmarks), that shortcut shows up as "My Documents" and I can rename it to anything BUT "Documents" as long as it doesn't have special characters. Which is why that area now contains links to Files, Tunes, and Images. Tomorrow it may be Dox, Trax, and Pix. Can you tell I'm getting punchy?

(I have a particular hatred of "My this and My that", both because it's patronizing, and because directory names with spaces are a pain to deal with on the command line.)

Have I mentioned before that I really, really, like to know where my files are and what they're called? And get irritated when systems lie to me about that? That goes double when they can't even keep the lies straight ...

At least I've got "Libraries" as far out of my face as I can manage without hacking the registry ... told the navigator pane to not show any of the default libraries, then unpinned the instance of Explorer that starts with Libraries from the taskbar and replaced it with one that opens in my personal folder. Wiktory!



A really bizarre oddity is that the old taskbar links from my Vista installation are still there -- hidden, of all places, in \users\$Name\appdata\roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch. Why Internet Explorer?

Comments

[arkessian]

I vaguely remember that Quick Launch first appeared as an Internet Explorer feature, only later spreading to Windows... I might be wrong though.

[ellarien]

Ah, that would make a certain amount of Microsofty sense.

I liked QuickLaunch.

[arkessian]

Microsofty sense... that unique brand of logic that defies mere human understanding.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I admire your tenacity in beating Win7 into submission. I am not an early adopter when it comes to operating systems. I usually am dragged into the newest OS kicking and screaming because I've reached the point where new peripherals just won't work with my old one.

In fact I'm still using Windows XP on the main machine, Windows 98 on the anciet IBM Thinkpad and of course Linux on the Eee.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

A considerable portion of my users - probably half of them - are still using XP, and people are buying new machines and setting up with XP. Of the people who have tried Win 7 - and who were enthusiastic about the change - several have changed back again.

[ellarien]

I set up a brand-new XP machine last week. It took maybe three hours to get it exactly to my liking. It's a little creaky and old-fashioned looking these days, but it's comfortably familiar to a lot of people by now, and it mostly does the job.

On the other hand, I like a bit of a challenge now and then -- not quite enough to take up Linux sysadminning as a hobby, mind.

[ellarien]

I got my first Win95 system in 1997, Win98 in 2000, and XP in 2004. My work desktop looked almost identical from 1995 to 2005, over two jobs and three or four different Sun workstations, so I understand the comfort of the familiar interface. Then I got the Vista desktop a couple of years ago, when Vista was new, and had enough trouble with it (though most of that wasn't directly Vista's fault) that I couldn't wait to get rid of it.

I have no plans to put Win7 on any of my XP machines.