I finally figured out how to make Win7 not suck; might be ready to say goodbye to XP
Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2019 8:39 am
Today, I learned the last pieces of information that I needed to learn in order to make Vistaspawn (Vista/7/8/10) usable and tolerable. With this, I might finally be ready to say goodbye to Windows XP, or at least never use it outside of virtual machines.
First, the cosmetic stuff:
1) Install Classic Shell and set as much stuff as possible to the way things worked in Win 9x
2) If you're in Vista or Win7, a "Classic" theme should be available in your list of themes. The Classic theme is not available for Win8 or Win10; you'll have to modify the start button, taskbar color, taskbar opacity, etc. manually to make them look normal.
3) Set taskbar icons to small. This will reduce the taskbar size from double-thickness to normal thickness.
4) There's nothing you can do about the lack of support for using animated gifs as wallpapers. Sorry.
Then, the meaningful, this-might-actually-impact-my-workflow stuff:
5) If you want a certain program to always appear on the "open with..." menu when right-clicking on a file, and Windows is giving you a hard time, you can force certain file type associations in Control Panel -> Default Programs -> "Associate a file type or protocol with a program". There used to be a way to give these associations custom names, like "OpEn iN dGiNdEx yOu wHoRe" or "I have some Notepadding to do!", back when Folder Options had a File Types tab; if anyone can tell me if this is still possible, I'd be grateful.
6) certain problems require restarts to fix, but Win8 and Win10 have this funny thing where all they really do is log you out and then log you back in when you tell them to reboot. This makes those problems harder to fix. You can disable this (called Hybrid Sleep) in Power Options
7) lower the UAC slider to its lowest level, then seize ownership of "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" according to the instructions presented here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/fo ... les-folder this will allow you to edit any file in either of these folders.
8) lowering the UAC slider to its lowest level will also re-enable downloading or saving directly to C:\
9) When you go to "Sort By...", your normal options might be replaced with ones that you don't want. For example, if a folder has a lot of WAV files in it, Windows will stupidly assume that the folder is for music, and will replace your normal options with Name, #, Title, Contributing Artists, and Album. To fix this, right-click on the folder, select Properties, go to the Customize tab, and set "Optimize this folder for..." to "General". You can also apply this automatically to all sub-folders.
10) If you want to run a 16-bit Windows program in a 64-bit version of windows, you'll need something like Win3mu.
Am I missing anything? Is there a way to make the search function not suck? Am I good to go?
First, the cosmetic stuff:
1) Install Classic Shell and set as much stuff as possible to the way things worked in Win 9x
2) If you're in Vista or Win7, a "Classic" theme should be available in your list of themes. The Classic theme is not available for Win8 or Win10; you'll have to modify the start button, taskbar color, taskbar opacity, etc. manually to make them look normal.
3) Set taskbar icons to small. This will reduce the taskbar size from double-thickness to normal thickness.
4) There's nothing you can do about the lack of support for using animated gifs as wallpapers. Sorry.
Then, the meaningful, this-might-actually-impact-my-workflow stuff:
5) If you want a certain program to always appear on the "open with..." menu when right-clicking on a file, and Windows is giving you a hard time, you can force certain file type associations in Control Panel -> Default Programs -> "Associate a file type or protocol with a program". There used to be a way to give these associations custom names, like "OpEn iN dGiNdEx yOu wHoRe" or "I have some Notepadding to do!", back when Folder Options had a File Types tab; if anyone can tell me if this is still possible, I'd be grateful.
6) certain problems require restarts to fix, but Win8 and Win10 have this funny thing where all they really do is log you out and then log you back in when you tell them to reboot. This makes those problems harder to fix. You can disable this (called Hybrid Sleep) in Power Options
7) lower the UAC slider to its lowest level, then seize ownership of "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" according to the instructions presented here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/fo ... les-folder this will allow you to edit any file in either of these folders.
8) lowering the UAC slider to its lowest level will also re-enable downloading or saving directly to C:\
9) When you go to "Sort By...", your normal options might be replaced with ones that you don't want. For example, if a folder has a lot of WAV files in it, Windows will stupidly assume that the folder is for music, and will replace your normal options with Name, #, Title, Contributing Artists, and Album. To fix this, right-click on the folder, select Properties, go to the Customize tab, and set "Optimize this folder for..." to "General". You can also apply this automatically to all sub-folders.
10) If you want to run a 16-bit Windows program in a 64-bit version of windows, you'll need something like Win3mu.
Am I missing anything? Is there a way to make the search function not suck? Am I good to go?