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The quick launch tray may get a little use from some people, but most 'regular users' I see are just confused by it. It doesn't confuse me, personally, but I have no use for it either. But all the other crap... and no you can't 'turn it off' in all cases. 'Active Desktop' for instance, can still cause crashes after you supposedly turn it off. If you grab TweakUI and a few other utilities, you can turn most of it off, but it's still in there, and can cause crashes, as well as slowing things down. Try WinXP on your oldest, slowest computer, sleek it down as much as you can, and then time how long it takes to open an explorer window. Then install 98lite with the 95 explorer and try it again. The difference is positively breathtaking. Hell, run the same experiment with stock 98SE and 'sleek' 98SElite, it's still very noticeable even there. And in that case the difference is entirely in the explorer.exe version.

But speed and resources aside, I've never had any trouble getting my 98lite 'sleek' machine to display explorer windows the way I want them. When I occasionally have to use a WinXP box it never wants to do that for me, and it appears I am not alone, and it sounds like it takes black magic to accomplish sometimes from the replies to that thread. And even if you do get the default set, some folders won't follow them without more black magic. Now I'm sure if I were motivated enough to take the time, I could probably find all the right invocations and get that thing to behave somewhat usably, but why should I when my method works better, faster, with less fuss? Not to mention allows me to avoid giving MS any more of my money.

VirtuaWin - Virtual desktop manager

PuTTY - SSH client

WinSCP - GUI-based SSH file copier

Mozilla - The Web browser

CygWin - UNIX-like command line tools and environment

FuhQuake - QuakeWorld client with advanced rendering.

Vim - text editor extraordinaire

VoodooLights - screen saver (alas, no longer supported or available)

TweakUI - Allows tweaking of various Windows UI details

DeliPlayer 2 - music player, including support for "MOD" formats

Schwab

Errr, well, I realize this is /. and all, and that Microsoft is therefore the Evil Empire, but actually the TweakUI add-on for Windows has a checkbox that says exactly that, and has for several years now.

Tweak UI for XP

TweakUI for 2k and prior versions

it's been a long time since i've used windows, but the best site at the time was called "windows annoyances". i think this is now www.annoyances.org. there are also books from the same content which i'd recommend as well, if you like the dead-tree format.

but mainly, i'd suggest trying to work within the system to convince them to make an exception for sys/netadmins and developers. i was in a similar situation about four years ago where i was using linux and transferred into a department where everyone was forced to use windows. so i basically made the case that developers and admins are different, can be responsible for their own machines, and can choose their own tech if they take the responsibility for it. i think the first point is key: once they accept that developers and admins should be allowed to play by different rules, a lot of the resistance will fade.

the other approach i'd consider would be just flying below the radar running linux. the reason i was using linux in the other dept was my department sysadmin didn't care. this is probably not an option for you with mandates from management and converting the whole department to xp. still, you might be able to repartition your hd and dual boot without getting noticed.

-esme

You don't always have to edit the registry. Sometimes its a simple point and click job. Details are here.

Could you please point me to the click-n-drool option button in Windows2000 that allows me to enable command-line completion? What, I have to manually edit the registry?

Here you go.

This brings back memories of Microsoft's attempt to "secure" Outlook back in Office XP...

1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed
14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently
7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs
1 to move it to the Lighting section
2 to argue then move it to the Electricals section
7 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs
5 to flame the spell checkers
3 to correct spelling/grammar flames
6 to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb" ... another 6 to condemn those 6 as stupid
2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is "lamp"
15 know-it-alls who claim they were in the industry, and that "light bulb" is perfectly correct
19 to post that this forum is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a lightbulb forum
11 to defend the posting to this forum saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts are relevant to this forum
36 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique and what brands are faulty
7 to post URL's where one can see examples of different light bulbs
4 to post that the URL's were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL's
3 to post about links they found from the URL's that are relevant to this group which makes light bulbs relevant to this group
13 to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all headers and signatures, and add "Me too"
5 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy
4 to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?"
13 to say "do a Google search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs"
1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again.

-------

Heh. I didn't write it, it came from here.

It's all from this whole website dedicated to making the lives of the windows users much easier. I like the animation of clippy getting stomped.

SCO also owns copyrights for Bible and soon will begin suing all churches around the world.

No, no, no. It is Microsoft that is working to acquire the Roman Catholic Church.

Sorry. I use Windows XP and I don't have this problem. Seems like it only happens on Win2k. Here is the answer: Annoyances

Google is your friend

I did the Windows Update thing as soon as I installed XP Pro. Then the Windows File Search stopped working, Yahoo Messenger stopped working, and Windows Media Player wouldn't start at all. The fix was to re-install XP. Maybe that's why some people haven't/don't/won't use(d) Windows Update. The File Search issue is a known problem, according to Windows Annoyances, but I've never seen a mention of exactly which patch _breaks_ which other piece of the system!

God I wish I didn't have to choose between replying and moderating...

Anyway, the parent is only part of the truth. I can say from extensive experience with Word in a legal environment that yes, in fact Word documents do blow up when opened in Word. Number formatting is a big problem, but really any time you have a document stretching over 100 pages or so you're asking for all sorts of weird problems. Not every one, but maybe 1 in a couple hundred or so. Take a library with several million documents and you realize that's a @#*)! load of *&*)@!# up documents.

MS intentionally obfuscated and otherwise complicated their binary document format (need I explain why?) and they have suffered almost as much as those trying to interoperate with it. Of course, since the world is locked in to Word it doesn't matter that their anti-competitive-driven technology decisions led to a fucked up product.

I've tried to sort out deep-seeded Word document problems with high-level (like, the ones you pay millions in support contracts to get to call) MS folks and even they couldn't sort out the document on a binary level. Ghost in the machine is about as far as they could say whenever I called with a completely impossible-but-it's-happening problem. Save document as plain text and reformat is the mantra for anyone working with large Word documents for a living.

For a small sample of Word-related issues see
annoyances dot org
Woody's Office Watch (amazing resource but you have to search through a lot of junk to find it).

And, just as a foot note, VBA is the most buggy, slow, impossible to use programming language I've ever had the horror to use. I'm not just throwing the Buggy word around either, it's unpredictable, awkward, ass-backwards and slow slow slow.

Me, I do web development now and use Edit Plus for all my document needs. I'm much, much, much happier now :)

"The Amish."

"Check."

"Oh, come on," I said. "They don't even wear BUTTONS. How did you get them to buy a computer operating system?"

"We told them there were actually 95 very small windows in the box," the Microsoft man admitted. "We sort of lied. Which means we are all going to Hell, every single employee of Microsoft."

Absolute baloney from a computer newbie using his first XP box. Windows 9x had many blue screens of death, and they were more commonly seen there than on NT. The quote in grandparent's sig is actually one that appeared in many blue screens of death.

Essentially, if you just get passingly familiar with browsing the registry, you can save yourself a lot of headaches in the long run. If anything is a problem, it's not that the registry is unmanagable, but that that regedit.exe is such a crude tool for browsing the database: really you ought to be able to use something with global find & replace, etc, but regedit doesn't provide anything like that. A better alternative is Lavasoft's RegHance, which makes working with the registry a bit easier -- and while you're at it, Lavasoft's AdAware for cleaning out spyware regularly.

In any case though, if you just get a rough feel for how things are organized, then you realize that there are only a handful of places where broken software can pull the system performance down. Just keeping the registry key for launching software on boot time well pruned gets you 80% of the way there, and pruning IE's reg tree of parasites (as AdAware can do for you automagically) gets you to 95% there most of the time.

Hearing people say that a regular reinstall is a better idea than registry maintainence is like hearing people advocate regular engine rebuilds on your car when a periodic oil change would have been much cheaper & much less painful -- it's a weird combination of naivete, ignorance, and cargo cultism that has never really made sense, and is only worse now that Win2k & WinXP are really pretty mature operating systems that don't need to be handled in such a hamfisted way anymore. Please join the 21st century & quit reinstalling your OS -- you'll be glad you did :-)

Thats because owning a girl is often more maintenance than its worth

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-100

No. It is a bug. See this

Here is a link to the Redsherrif removal info.

How did this get selected? I think this is a conspiracy. This is obviously a question that is specific to a particular app that runs under Windows. It's not News for Nerds but more like a Windows Annoyance Sounds like Cliff was secretly replaced by a Perl script, or worse a VB script, that counts key words (ssh, cvs, environment variables, command line, password) and posts the highest scored submissions.

for the obligatory jokes about how this would put Microsoft out of business.
I mean, Windows IS a virus, right?

Maybe tweakui will be updated to make this behavior optional.
(Here is another link, because the MS page is down right now.)

Why? Well, what use is a four year old copy of Python when I can download a current version just as easily? I'd have been happier if that one was a couple bucks cheaper, just as I was happy about the blurbs on the back of Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and Mac OS9 Missing Manual saying that avoiding the cd keeps costs down while allowing you to get more up to date software. As a paying customer, I appreciate that sort of consideration for my needs and my wallet. So to me, it's kind of a tradeoff among several factors. In no particular order:

• Having the media for a large set of software like FreeBSD is good, because it can avoid a huge download and I can live with a complete but outdated version of things, for a while anyway.
• Having the media for the CD bookshelf is good because it gives you the text -- in this case, of several books -- in searchable digital format.
• Providing the media for smaller, rapidly evolving material like a programming language or major application is less appealing when downloading is a viable alternative.
• Providing a central website is a great way to keep updated while saving some of the publishing costs, but the risk there is that you could lose ready access to the material if the site disappears or moves (like for example the FreeBSD book, though of course that's available elsewhere too; that isn't always the case of course).
• Obviously, the shelf life of a lot of CD-ROMs is limited, and people aren't going to be happy about paying for something out of date. Even if the material happens to be current, if it can be downloaded for free then there's little benefit in having the disc.
• On the other hand, sites obviously aren't eternal but discs come close enough for most purposes (even if their contents don't hold up as well), and download size is a factor to consider.
• Copyright is another angle that your publisher will probably want to have some control over, and no one likes having to go through arcane, tedious hoops to download some tools [I'm looking at you, Apple -- your Developer's site is a royal pain in the ass...], and no one wants to be the victim of an abandoned product
• If you're going to include a CD then you might as well fill up all 600mb or so of available space: if there's room for it and you're not afraid of copyright infrigement, include the text of the book, otherwise throw in a Linux distribution, tools like Perl & Apache [for Unix, Windows, and Mac], pad it out with DeCSS code, etc. In short, make it worth the customer's extra cash. (Slight counterargument: you probably don't want to take on support liability for anything you include, so don't forget whatever legalese would be appropriate there.)

Deciding what way to go is a matter of looking at factors like these & others, and evaluating what you're trying to provide for your customer and what their expectations are likely to be over time. If the digital material is just a supplement to the book, and can be easily downloaded, then most customers will probably appreciate it if you save them a few bucks & don't include the CD. On the other hand, if the book is really a supplement to the discs, and the digital material is difficult or impossible to download (for bandwidth, copyright, or other reasons) then including the CD media is a good idea. Find out where things seem to balance and make your decision from there.

link
lol

Customize those context menus. Or just change the assotiation on the fly. When I used Windows, I read all of the site (mainly around 1995/1996).

(Aside) MS really did pack in a lot of useful features (even if the UI never tells you things like F2 = rename in explorer). The closest file manager tool I've found for Linux that's as useful on the get go as Win95 Explorer is Midnight Commander, which I spend most of my time using (even in Gnome/KDE). No GMC, Konq, or Nautilus for me :)

Customize those context menus. Or just change the assotiation on the fly. When I used Windows, I read all of the site (mainly around 1995/1996).

(Aside) MS really did pack in a lot of useful features (even if the UI never tells you things like F2 = rename in explorer). The closest file manager tool I've found for Linux that's as useful on the get go as Win95 Explorer is Midnight Commander, which I spend most of my time using (even in Gnome/KDE). No GMC, Konq, or Nautilus for me :)

There's a rebuttal list to this comment made by the head of some automotive company.

For example, I'd like a real active desktop. I'd like to have icons that change or move around based on relevant events. I want a screen background that has my Slashboxes and tips about what I'm doing in windows. I want a graphical shell interface (at least this one I'm doing something about...).

or you can just turn the documents menu off see:
http://www.annoyances.org/win95/win95ann1.html#05

From the KDE FAQ:

KDE is not a clone. Specifically KDE is not a CDE or Windows clone. While the KDE developers have and will continue to glean the best features from all existing desktop environments KDE is a truly unique environment that has and will continue to go its own way.

It looks to me as though some of other OSes' (namely, Windows 95) worst features were also gleaned. For example:

• KDE decides to put new windows in the most annoying places. Whenever I launch Xemacs, half the window is off the screen.
  
  
• The above problem is aggravated further by the fact that KDE does not remember window positions. No matter how many times I drag my Xemacs window to the upper left corner, the next time I launch it, KDE will still put Xemacs back halfway off the screen where it thinks is best.
  
  
• 'Cute' animation abounds. No, I don't need to wait while I watch my windows maximize and minimize, thank you...
  
  
• The default file dialog window size is tiny, not to mention not persistent when resized. Folks, the days of 320x200 monitors is long behind us; there's no reason why we shouldn't be allowed to see more files at once when we go to open or save a document.

While I have no doubt that the designers of KDE did not intentionally make parts of their interface bug-for-bug compatible with Windows, it is obvious that they have, at times, been trapped in the Microsoft paradigm. I can only hope that KDE 2 will have addressed these misfeatures. If not, I recommend the designers pick up a copy of Windows 9[5|8] Annoyances lest they repeat more of Microsoft's mistakes. If I were looking to "glean features" from an OS GUI, Windows 95 would not be high on my list of interfaces to emulate.

Regards,

http://www.annoyances.org/win95/