Dead-Fish.com

Something I totally agree with…

We love Windows 7: That’s the message loud and clear from people this week at the TechMentor Conference held at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash. With Windows XP reaching end of life for support in April 2014, the plan for most organizations is to upgrade — to Windows 7.

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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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Long term resident on my hard drive, XP-Antispy which also supports Vista & Win7, disables or removes a slew of features that do nothing for performance, privacy or security. The interface is straight-forward and all the relevant options are explained. Usually first run after windows installations. Note that you need administrator rights for some actions which can be activated in the ‘Special’ menu.

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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…

With Windows 7 on the horizon, a timely reminder for all.  Whilst it’s not complicated, its very easy to forget a file or two thousand…

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Given that the finished product is kicking around the place, here come the reviews…

This is a near perfect software release, that rarest of upgrades that improves on virtually everything about its predecessor while losing nothing of serious importance. Yes, there are nits. Sure, I’d have liked to have seen a few components of the OS turn out a bit differently. No software is truly perfect. But you don’t have to qualify the successes of Windows 7 as you did with Windows Vista. Windows 7 is just excellent, with no caveats attached. And Windows 7 isn’t excellent within the context of its reduced development cycle and the resultant reduced expectations. It’s just excellent, plain and simple. No ifs, ands, or buts.

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