Dead-Fish.com

There are quite a few oddities with Mircrosoft’s new OS, although it would appear to be Vista Service Pack 3 which brings a new rather drab UI in much the same way that  Win7 was Vista with tweaks and a slightly prettier face.

In short you get a rather fugly flat looking desktop and some tiles on a brightly coloured “Start” screen that might be OK on a tablet, however on a big monitor they are swamped and to be frank who would stare at that screen for more than a few seconds?  It might be a fun place for people who smother their desktops with icons, becomes a major irritant every time you hit the Winkey to switch windows to a place that brings nothing useful to a desktop PC.

First up Winkey + H which allows you to Share, or at least it would if it actually worked.  Why add a none functioning keyboard shortcut?

I love Tom Waits and I’m pretty partial to the Cookie Monster, so this video from Joker made me laugh…

I don’t have a TV tuner in my PC, but I do have broadband.  Windows Media Centre can be customised to show a lot of UK TV, free.  Install, run Media Centre, select Extras (Win 7 users) job done.  I’m watching superbike racing from Cookstown at the moment…:)

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Given how new Win 7 is, I doubt many people are bored of this button yet.  Still, if you are you can change it it seems..

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OK, pressing Alt to show menus every time I want to see bookmarks annoyed the hell out of me in short order, so Hide Menu Bar (press Alt) got uninstalled.  Despite the fact I have an enormous monitor (2560 x 1600) the chunky and annoying 3 layered version tool bar  in Firefox (4 if you count the status bar) has always annoyed me and the extra room gained by losing the menus needed further investigation.

Eventually I came across Tiny Menu which does NOT, at first glance, do what I want it to:

Tiny Menu as intended

however, what it does do is allow you to drag all the elements in any of you tool bars to where you want.  Once I’d moved them to 1 line, I simply diable Tiny Menu to get this:

Combined version

We’ll see if this lasts a bit longer…

There’s a beta that runs in 64-bit, but the URLs are not Mozilla, so I suspect they are simply home-brewed versions, but if you use them it seems that most of your plugins then fail.

So, Firefox remains 32-bit until 4.0 I suspect.  Speaking of plugins, it’s possible to make it look more at home in Win7 using some of the plugins shown on this page.  I’ve added:

• Hide Menu Bar (press Alt)
• Glasser
• Office Black – the only theme I have found innofensive and usable.

and the rest I use diffent ones to suit my own needs:

I’m interested in what others use, feel free to post comments…:)

Whilst the zero configuration Homegroup for Win7 PCs is a nice idea, not a lot of use in a house with Vista & XP boxes.  Straight forward enough to fix though if you follow this guide:

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Courtesy of one of the two Raptors going pop Windows 7 has arrived.  Kind of annoying having spent the last few days re-installing everything on Vista.  So faced with an ugly bill for two more Raptors at £115 each for 150 MB drives or £90 for 3 x 160s I went with the second option, allowing RAID 5 and recovery in place should another HD die as well as some of the previous speed perks from striping.

Given they unbelievable number of downloads to fully patch Vista I’ve just experienced, I thought I’d swap to Win7, which to be frank, doesn’t look very different at all and feels as fast as the recently dead Vista, meh…

There continues to be a load of crap posted about XP being better than Vista and Windows 7 treated as the high performance future, despite it being Vista based with a new front end and some performance enhancements.  XP is the past, Vista is better and touch wood, Win7 better yet.  Performance tests support this…

Throughout our testing the Windows 7 build was able to outperform XP running on the same hardware. In some cases such as Left 4 Dead the performance difference was quite small however in more demanding scenarios such as World In Conflict the increase was much more noticeable. Windows 7 also performed favourably when compared to Vista although it would be hard to tell the difference when actually playing.

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