It's no secret that I was very anti-Vista before being pretty much forced into getting a Vista-powered laptop a few months ago. I was seriously considering downgrading my machine to XP. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, I say. The XP OS was mature, stable and delivered what I needed. I've never felt the need to have bells, whistles and the latest, greatest anything. I also could care less about the Apple/Microsoft arguments-you simply buy what you need and be done with it. Give me a machine that's stable, has an office suite, plays music and DVD's and I'm pretty much happy.
So, as I mentioned, I now own a Vista-powered machine. I unwrapped it, plugged it in and fired it up. I wiped the bullshit programs, installed my favorites, uploaded my music and video files and that was the sum of my personalization of this machine. I never watched a tutorial, read a manual, or explored the capabilities of this new OS. The only thing I cared to learn about Vista was how to turn off the damn sidebar and user account control. It's a tool, not a toy after all...
Fast forward to yesterday. Love that sentence by the way... A crew member stops in my office to learn how to turn off user account control. I give him the goods and he leaves. About 20 minutes later he comes down and wants to hug me, play grab-ass and shit like that, he's so happy to be free of those annoying "allow" requests. Last night I stopped in to look at his computer and browse the software he offered me for helping him out. While drooling over the $3300.00 USD Adobe CS 3.3 Master Collection he kept waving under my nose ("Take it man, you earned it!") I noticed a nice little feature on his laptop. If you've ever seen a Mac and noticed a clean desktop and all those pesky icons bundled on a little hide-away tool bar and thought, "Ooooh, I'd like that little bastard on my PC", now you can. Considered a gift to Windows users, from a Mac fan boy and fan girl-you can now get a program to dock all your desktop icons, links, programs and minimized files and get it FREE.
From my buddy's memory stick, I downloaded a small, free-ware program called RocketDocket (TM) from PunkLabs. Installed in 30 seconds, figured out how to use it in another 30 seconds. Drag all those desktop icons onto your RocketDocket and you're instantly styling with a huge, empty desktop. All your icons are now organized. Better, they auto-hide. Even better, you can download hundreds of icon sets (.png files) from a link in settings and they are AWESOME. I actually downloaded three sets of icons, randomly, dumped them into RocketDocket, then began scrolling through to see if any were passable. Good Lord, they were all mind-blowing. In addition to icons, you can also download "docklets", which are similar to Windows Vista sidebar gadgets, but after scrolling through all of them, I saw nothing very worthwhile.
Regardless, in less than 10 minutes I downloaded the single, most useful program I've ever encountered for a PC/laptop, downloaded custom icons and customized each of my 25 icons, changed a few settings, completely cleared my desktop, increased my machine's functionality and for the first time, made this machine my own.
In fact, I was so blown away by the experience that it moved me to actually explore Vista's capabilities and features for the first time. I've even re-loaded the sidebar and downloaded a dozen gadgets, though ended up keeping only the talking girl clock, total system usage and Windows Media Player gadgets. They're actually the only things visible on my desktop, now:)
So, as I mentioned, I now own a Vista-powered machine. I unwrapped it, plugged it in and fired it up. I wiped the bullshit programs, installed my favorites, uploaded my music and video files and that was the sum of my personalization of this machine. I never watched a tutorial, read a manual, or explored the capabilities of this new OS. The only thing I cared to learn about Vista was how to turn off the damn sidebar and user account control. It's a tool, not a toy after all...
Fast forward to yesterday. Love that sentence by the way... A crew member stops in my office to learn how to turn off user account control. I give him the goods and he leaves. About 20 minutes later he comes down and wants to hug me, play grab-ass and shit like that, he's so happy to be free of those annoying "allow" requests. Last night I stopped in to look at his computer and browse the software he offered me for helping him out. While drooling over the $3300.00 USD Adobe CS 3.3 Master Collection he kept waving under my nose ("Take it man, you earned it!") I noticed a nice little feature on his laptop. If you've ever seen a Mac and noticed a clean desktop and all those pesky icons bundled on a little hide-away tool bar and thought, "Ooooh, I'd like that little bastard on my PC", now you can. Considered a gift to Windows users, from a Mac fan boy and fan girl-you can now get a program to dock all your desktop icons, links, programs and minimized files and get it FREE.
From my buddy's memory stick, I downloaded a small, free-ware program called RocketDocket (TM) from PunkLabs. Installed in 30 seconds, figured out how to use it in another 30 seconds. Drag all those desktop icons onto your RocketDocket and you're instantly styling with a huge, empty desktop. All your icons are now organized. Better, they auto-hide. Even better, you can download hundreds of icon sets (.png files) from a link in settings and they are AWESOME. I actually downloaded three sets of icons, randomly, dumped them into RocketDocket, then began scrolling through to see if any were passable. Good Lord, they were all mind-blowing. In addition to icons, you can also download "docklets", which are similar to Windows Vista sidebar gadgets, but after scrolling through all of them, I saw nothing very worthwhile.
Regardless, in less than 10 minutes I downloaded the single, most useful program I've ever encountered for a PC/laptop, downloaded custom icons and customized each of my 25 icons, changed a few settings, completely cleared my desktop, increased my machine's functionality and for the first time, made this machine my own.
In fact, I was so blown away by the experience that it moved me to actually explore Vista's capabilities and features for the first time. I've even re-loaded the sidebar and downloaded a dozen gadgets, though ended up keeping only the talking girl clock, total system usage and Windows Media Player gadgets. They're actually the only things visible on my desktop, now:)
