I've migrated to Windows 7

[koitsu]

I hope to see a video of Tepples dancing a jig as a result.

That is all.

Edit 2015/02/11 -- HA HA HA: I LIED! :P

[mikejmoffitt]

Despite the lack of accelerated surface, have you:

-Enabled classic mode theming
-Disabled cleartype as well as anti-aliasing
-Set the taskbar to small icons, don't combine unless full
-Enabled run in the start menu
-Disabled desktop gadgets
-Set the desktop icon size to "medium"
-Set the control panel layout to a non-categorized one
-Disabled UAC

?

I'm just naming things that I do on firstboot of a Win7 install...

[zzo38]

-Enabled run in the start menu

While I don't use Windows 7 on my own computer, I don't expect to need it can't you still use WIN+R to open the run dialog box anyways? However, the thing I always do when working on such a computer is to enable underlined ALT access keys.

[Bregalad]

Conglaturation !

[tokumaru]

While I don't love any Windows version in particular, I don't regret moving from XP to 7 (which I did 3 or so years ago). XP is badly outdated, not even being able to use all the RAM and other resources we have available today. It is a 14 year old OS afterall.

I wish I had the balls to switch to Linux, but my experiences with it so far have been pretty frustrating. I can't install new drivers even if my life depends on it, and when I do get everything working, the OS will randomly break and become unusable after updates.

[Bregalad]

I wish I had the balls to switch to Linux, but my experiences with it so far have been pretty frustrating.

There is no need to "switch to" Linux, as it's common to have both Windows and Linux on the same machine, then you can boot whichever you want. Actually I setup most of my machines like that, I use Linux mostly for work and Windows mostly for leisure.

I can't install new drivers even if my life depends on it, and when I do get everything working, the OS will randomly break and become unusable after updates.

I had the same issue with Fedora, actually the OS couldn't even update itself back when I tried it, but anyway even without updates tit became broken and unusable as I installed more programs and especially started to disinstall some I didn't need to get extra disk space (this was not a good idea).

I installed Gentoo recently and while the process is much longer and more troublesome than any other distro, I must say the result is surprisingly usable so far. I don't know in the long run though. Someone (I don't know how trustable he is) told me Gentoo has the best update system, as it does not uninstall anything and cause trouble like other update system does.

[Asaki]

I'm just naming things that I do on firstboot of a Win7 install...

I was overwhelmed with the amount of registry hacks required to make 7 into something I could use on a daily basis, and gave up and reinstalled XP =( Having everything default to "Libraries" instead of my root drives made many tasks take much longer than they should have. Ugh.

Not that I'm in love with XP, but it ain't broke yet, and the FLP version is pretty nice.

[loopy]

I was a die-hard XP user until only a year ago, when I was also forced to change.

I'm a big fan of http://www.classicshell.net/. Adds lots of customization options for the start menu and explorer so you can make things work the way they're "supposed" to

[tepples]

I hope to see a video of Tepples dancing a jig as a result.

You'll have to make do with me playing In The Groove and someone else playing a StepMania song.

Disabled cleartype as well as anti-aliasing

I don't know what monitors other people use, but I myself use all LCDs, and subpixel rendering looks better to me than 1bpp fonts, especially with freeware fonts that aren't well hinted.

Disabled UAC

I left UAC on for the same reason that OS X and Ubuntu use "sudo"-type structures to distinguish "things you do as an administrator" from "things you do as a normal user".

can't you still use WIN+R to open the run dialog box anyways?

Not if your keyboard lacks a Windows key. Some gamers pry off the Windows key or buy older keyboards that lack it so that an accidental press of the key between Ctrl and Alt doesn't cause the player to lose the DirectX context and consequently either the progress in a full-screen single-player game or the connection to a multiplayer game.

I can't install new drivers [into GNU/Linux] even if my life depends on it

Most of the time in GNU/Linux, you don't have to "install new drivers". The included kernel is supposed to automatically recognize your hardware and enable the appropriate drivers.

There is no need to "switch to" Linux, as it's common to have both Windows and Linux on the same machine

And lose your connections to IRC, Skype, etc. for five minutes.

Having everything default to "Libraries" instead of my root drives made many tasks take much longer than they should have.

I don't know if it's a result of having installed Classic Shell, but on Windows 8.1, Win+E opens File Explorer to "This PC" (formerly "My Computer").

[thefox]

Disabled UAC

I left UAC on for the same reason that OS X and Ubuntu use "sudo"-type structures to distinguish "things you do as an administrator" from "things you do as a normal user".

Based on installing Windows 8.1 some weeks ago (got a new computer), I find UAC isn't too bad nowadays. It was terrible in Vista. I guess it depends somewhat on how much legacy software one has to use.

can't you still use WIN+R to open the run dialog box anyways?

Not if your keyboard lacks a Windows key. Some gamers pry off the Windows key or buy older keyboards that lack it so that an accidental press of the key between Ctrl and Alt doesn't cause the player to lose the DirectX context and consequently either the progress in a full-screen single-player game or the connection to a multiplayer game.

Uh, so there are games out there nowadays that don't handle DirectX context loss? (Not a quip, I honestly don't know since I don't play many modern games.)

[Movax12]

A number of 'gamer' keyboards have a function key to disable the windows key.

[tepples]

Some gamers pry off the Windows key or buy older keyboards that lack it so that an accidental press of the key between Ctrl and Alt doesn't cause the player to lose the DirectX context

Uh, so there are games out there nowadays that don't handle DirectX context loss?

Even if it's handled, that doesn't mean your character won't get a bullet in the head while you're getting back to the game.

[Dwedit]

Still on XP for me... Waiting for Skylake before I upgrade. I wonder how much faster than Merom it will be.

[koitsu]

Despite the lack of accelerated surface, have you:

-Enabled classic mode theming
-Disabled cleartype as well as anti-aliasing
-Set the taskbar to small icons, don't combine unless full
-Enabled run in the start menu
-Disabled desktop gadgets
-Set the desktop icon size to "medium"
-Set the control panel layout to a non-categorized one
-Disabled UAC

I'm laughing right now -- all of these things are the same things I change too. There's a lot more I tweak than just this, sadly, and I really need to keep a list of it because the list is quite long compared to what I tweaked on XP (or maybe on XP it's just second-nature to me by now).

The only one in your list I hadn't gotten to was disabling gadgets, which AFAIK Microsoft decommed anyway citing security concerns. I'll have to do that.

I had to resort to using Aero. All my testing (weeks/month) on a VM showed that Classic or Basic worked fine, but on actual hardware etc. it appears that Classic/Basic has a problem with "excessively refreshing/redrawing" portions of an application window when something in that particular object/text changes. You can actually see it flicker. In Aero, with the same app: doesn't happen. *sigh*

The disable ClearType + font smoothing (which are separate things) settings I do too, but I spent almost 5 hours yesterday fiddling with web browsers and trying to get shit to render/look like it used to on XP (i.e. GDI). I found way too many Stackoverflow + Reddit posts talking about this exact problem, and nobody has a good solution other than "turn on ClearType" (I'm not doing it, period. I HATE text looking blurry). And the thing is, the behaviour varies per browser. I use Firefox (or Pale Moon) for personal stuff, and Chrome for work, so those are the only two I cared about.

The biggest problem I have is with downloadable fonts. Sites like Google+ are a great example -- they use a font called "Roboto" which is apparently designed around ClearType or subpixel whatever, so when you don't use that it looks like complete dogshit (see picture on left). That's how a lot of downloadable fonts look in Firefox too. So this is what I managed to use as a workaround for both browsers, when ClearType is off + font smoothing is off:

Chrome 40 -- chrome://flags then disable DirectWrite (note that the toggle is called "Disable DirectWrite", so to disable it you actually have to set the setting to "Enabled")
Firefox 35 -- about:config then set gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled=false

The result in Chrome is good -- downloadable fonts look like they did on XP (which to me was tolerable). The result in Firefox is also good, but the downside is this: there are tons of sites that use downloadable fonts with special Unicode glyphs within those fonts (usually for stupid things like little arrows, emojis, or whatever else -- Wordpress.com's editor is a great example), so by turning off downloadable fonts, on Windows 7 those now just appear as a box.

To be honest going to 7 is pretty awful. I feel like I've taken a serious step backwards in usability in a lot of ways. There are other things I do like, like how disk I/O is insanely fast compared to XP (even with an SSD + AHCI on XP), and the taskbar improvements are nice (I'm used to those from my old job), but there are a lot of other things that make me cringe and I'm just going to have to force myself to adapt.

Oh, the one last thing I'm fearing having to deal with because I don't know what the hell Microsoft did with it: figuring out what exactly happened to "My Documents". On XP, you had a "My Documents" folder which defaulted to C:\Documents and Settings\accountname\My Documents. If your desktop was set to show that folder, you could right-click on it and change internally where that pointed. And I always did -- I reassigned it to D:\Important Documents because my C: drive is "sacrificial", meaning an OS reinstall (format, etc.) would lose all data on C:. So pointing it to a folder on D: makes a lot of sense.

On Windows 7 I have no fucking idea what they did to all of this. Now I'm left with a folder called accountname on my desktop, which apparently is some kind of "Library". I have no clue what that is, how to manage it, etc.. The reason this concerns me is that I have games that have save files, important documents (taxes, PDFs, bills/debts, etc.) that I store in a centralised place (see above), and now I have not the slightest idea how I'm going to centralise all of that onto my D: drive. Why Microsoft changed this is beyond me. I see absolutely nothing good from it.

Edit: Oh, and because I use small desktop icons, I had to use this registry tweak to make the shortcut "icon/overlay" arrow much smaller (like on XP), because otherwise the shortcut arrow ends up covering practically 1/4th of the icon:

Code: Select all

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Icons]
"29"="%SystemRoot%\\System32\\SHELL32.dll,29"

Microsoft!!! *shakes fist*

[loopy]

Oh, the one last thing I'm fearing having to deal with because I don't know what the hell Microsoft did with it: figuring out what exactly happened to "My Documents". On XP, you had a "My Documents" folder which defaulted to C:\Documents and Settings\accountname\My Documents. If your desktop was set to show that folder, you could right-click on it and change internally where that pointed. And I always did -- I reassigned it to D:\Important Documents because my C: drive is "sacrificial", meaning an OS reinstall (format, etc.) would lose all data on C:. So pointing it to a folder on D: makes a lot of sense.

Still works. \Documents and Settings is now \Users. Right click on special folders, go to the Properties -> Location tab.