My ideal Windows XP setup

This is mainly a guide for me to remember all the little tweaks and apps I use while building my ideal Windows XP setup. This is a Work In Progress and probably remain that way.

General Desktop Tweaks

I like my taskbar to be on the top of my screen

This is because I find it more natural to go for the taskbar and the start menu at the top. I liken this to a physical desk or workspace: I general keep things I will need like a stapler, hole-punch, pens, etc.. at the top of my desk away from me – not towards me near my chest. It’s too bad Microsoft and other graphical desktops default to the bottom, because once you try using it at the top for a while you will never go back. I suggest you give it at least a good 4 weeks before discounting it. Another thing I forgot to mention, I always auto-hide the taskbar and disable it from being on top of other windows.

No junk on the desktop

Having a programming background with some experience with graphics programming, having a lot of artifacts to draw on the desktop is a lot of overhead. I prefer my background to be solid and black. I still keep the recycling bin on there until I find out a better way to deal with it (suggestions anyone?) What this does is reduce any drawing overhead associated with moving windows, minimizing, maximizing, etc.. Call it a complex, I don’t care. When I see people with 5000 icons on their desktop and some ridiculous wallpaper that is 2048×1536 pixels in PNG or JPG scaled down to XGA (automatically and very inefficiently by Windows) it seriously makes sick to the stomach. I’m not talking about the casual computer user either, some of these people should really know better!

With the above two done, the desktop is actually usable and fun to work with. There’s a sense of peace I feel when working that way. When I use other people’s computers with taskbars on the left side of the desktop opened up 1/4 of the way into the desktop with a hundred icons sitting there – some of them important documents even, I feel more dirty than being in a hostess bar full of Thai hookers with nothing but a bathing suit on.

Start menu heirarchy

I delete everything that is in the programs folder of the start menu – EVERTHING! I create top-level folders called: dev, net, apps, sys, games, Startup. in dev goes my development related shortcuts, net goes any network related apps, sys goes any system related apps like alcohol 52%, VMWare, TweakUI, etc.. In apps goes things like Office, Photoshop, etc.. Usually there are no sub-folders beyond these 5 as I don’t keep shortcuts to uninstallers, help, etc..

System Tray

I like having as much horizontal space in my taskbar as possible for running apps, so I hide all systray icons! Exceptions are things like Winamp and pidgin and anything that basically minimizes to it.

Installed Software

• Pidgin w/ Pidgin Encryption
• Eclipse
• JDK 1.6
• VMWare Server 1.x – so I can boot into FreeBSD on my other partition
• TrueCrypt
• MS Office 2003 (I don’t like OpenOffice – it is not very compatible with MS Office, and Office 2007 is ugly as all hell)
• Picassa 2 – for photo-editing and managing pr0n

Customizing the file open/save dialog in Windows XP

Windows by default will create icons “My Recent Documents” “Desktop” “My Documents” “My Computer” and “My Network Places” in the dialog. I rarely use any of them and I usually need to quickly browse to C:\, and C:\Documents and Settings\<username> as most of the apps I use put files there like uTorrent, Newsleecher, etc..

What I prefer to do to make navigation faster is to remove the unneeded icons and add my own. The utility I use is: TweakUI as part of the PowerToys suite of apps. It’s quick to use and easy to do. Here’s a screenshot of the dialog and what I did:

Here’s a screenshot of the File dialog:

Obviously you will want to add your own links as appropriate.