Digg up a del.icio.us desktop

Is the object dock like a glorified quick launch bar or do open programs appear in it or what?

 

you can make it so that programs appear in it too if you wish.

 

How do you find out the city code for the weather dodar in weather.com??

 

I'm using Konfab for weather reports

 

More a quick launch for the under-5s. Icons zoom out at you Roger-Rabbit style, bit frightening really.

I keep trying fancy themes and stuff, but keep going back to Win Classic.

 

Well it was definetly interesting to see how other people feel about their desktop, I liked the article.

I myself don't have any enthusiasm nor time for those things. For me it's just rubbish but if it makes some people feel in power of their pc, or feel cool then it is a great thing. Good for them. The first thing I do after a fresh install, I turn everything for best performance. So my Desktops has not changed much since 95 =DDDD Damn Happy 10 years Desktop.

It's just that I don't spend too much time staring into my desktop, nor in borders around my applications. So widgets and glass effects becomes like spyware to me =) It just sits there and uses memory.

With hasty 21st century lifestyle I can't find time for these things. I just run to computer, open this, open that... so many things to do, so little time. I am sure that I would customize my desktop with much fun if I'd have like a week with no worries, no responsibilities... Just a week hanging out on your PC.

 

The problem with objectdock for people like me is that I hardly ever see my wallpaper or my desktop in the first place- I load all my programs from the start bar and switch between them. I only have my recycle bin on the desktop so the objectdock launch bar will hardly ever be used.

<A88>

 

The site isnt working for me now, same as some of the previous posters.
Found a link though: http://crystalxp.zerackiel.net/bricopack-vista-inspirat.php



Personally I like it but it all just eats resources so I have mine setup so all visual themes and special animated menus and stuff are off.
The only thing I like added in XP is the "drop shadows under icon text" so thats on, other that than my desktop looks exactly the same as it did when I ran 95/98.
Still, willing to give this a shot anyway. If I dont like it just remove it.

Also: to the people saying why re-install every 6 months? Why wouldnt you? I couldn't have a rotting old install just sat there running like a dog

 

I did a clean re-install Friday evening, box was taking an extra few seconds to get going and the partitioning that was fine for 98SE was really far too small a C: for XP.

Much nippier now, but it's a job I normally need a decent excuse to do, like a new drive or OS. Reinstalling Win is easy, the big suites aren't too bad, but reinstalling umpteen dozen little utilities that really improve on MS, Moz, etc, is a pain.

And I've lost my Hall of Fame in Kyodai...

 

Actually you with some regedit, uninstall, msconfig, and just simple cleaning you can avoid reinstalling so often.

 

What does that mean? I don't get it, why would someone reinstall their OS? The only reason I could see is if something was severely wrong with the install, and the machine wouldn't boot or something, but even then you just fix it. From time to time I hear people saying they do this "regularly", but no one has ever given me a good reason why. Starting a machine over from scratch is just so much of a hassle, I can't imagine doing it. I buy a machine, I install the OS. Next time I install is 3-5 years later, but it's on a new machine.

 

See cpemma's post a couple up. This is a place where people do actually worry if their computer takes a few extra seconds to do something. It's all about streamlining

Weren't people having a race at one time to see who's computer cold booted fastest? What was the final score?

 

@TheSpoonman: I reinstall my OS every so often for many different reasons:

A) I dislike anti-spyware and anti-virus software that runs in the background, for whatever reason it alwasy seems to be using more resources than what I am saving by running it in the software. It does mean that after 2 months my system's always clogged full of adware etc.

B) I always find myself downloading things and trying things out etc, however my HDD space is limited (only 80GB) and therefore need to clear things out every once in a while simply because my harddisk is full, and I fail to do so meaning my harddisk gets full (and I mean full) after about 4 months.

C) Games run slower due to XP's registry getting clogged up, spyware as mentioned above and all the other crap I don't even know is running.

D) Reinstalling costs me no more than a weekend, and having a system boot in 25 seconds as opposed to 25 minutes is great! It also allows me to take good things from the previous OS install and leave the bad bits out, like games I never play won't be reinstalled, leaving more HDD space for other things.

E) I just like having a nippy, fresh, cleaned up system, not one that is all full and messed up with three years of me using it. To the average Joe, yes it's a hassle to reinstall the OS, but to me it's worth the effort.

 

dude wtf, you are seriously doing something wrong if you have those issues...

 

your memory? i'm considering trying it, but i don't want it to eat up too much. i have 2.5 gigs of pc3200, though, so...

let me know.

 

So, why are we setting up things like objectdock and Konfabulator? I've run 'em myself for a while, and while they don't take much in terms of resources, they take a lot more than not running them.

So, a) run Firefox and/or b) run MS's antispyware once a week or so (so far the best once I've found) and/or c) run your AV once a week or so, too. I haven't seen a piece of spyware on my machine in well over a year. I think the last virus I has was Jerusalem. Even leaving the AS running has minimal resource impact, less than running Knofabulator and Objectdock (7.6M of RAM usage as opposed to over 16M). AV, since it uses a filter-level driver will have a performance impact above and beyond RAM usage, which is why I don't run it full-time. ClamAV is nice in that it's free, updated a little quicker than the big vendors sometimes, and doesn't force you to run it in the background like the big names. Setting it up as a scheduled nightly task works just fine for me.

You should consider running AV full-time, though. If you've got that many problems, you've prolly been infected pretty regularly, too. That means your machine could be a zombie for up to 6 months before you reinstall, affecting other machines on the Internet.

Man, I remember when I was limited by my 80 MEGAbyte hd! I thought after upgrading my 5MB to a 10M, that going from 10 to 80 would mean I'd never need to worry about space again! But, I digress...You wipe your harddrive, reinstall the OS, and go through the tedius process of re-tweaking everything all over again solely to clear up your HD? As an SE, I'm always doing the same with my work laptop, which only has a 30G drive, and the way I've found to clear it off is to use Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.

Clogged up? What does that mean? If you've got software installed, it'll have entries in the registry (unless it's poorly written and still uses an ini). If you reinstall your OS, and then reinstall the software those entries come back. There are some programs that leave reg entries behind (after you uninstall) of course, but those entries don't make any difference. If you're worried about them you can use a product like RegClean Supreme once in a while to clear them out. They really don't make any difference, though. Even after 3-5 years of installing and uninstalling software left and right running a regclean has never made any noticeable difference in performance for me. Well, no, if I right-click in Explorer and choose New ->, the submenu comes up faster.

Ok, again, if you just want to free up drive space uninstalling those old games will do that. As for boot times, well, they've never been that important to me as I either don't reboot all that often or use the hibernation features of my laptops (you can use hibernation on a lot of desktops, too if you're worried about electricity usage). However, if you want to improve those speeds proper maintenance takes less time and works better. When you install an app, see if it places items in the startup areas of your registry (HKLM\Software\MS\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, and the same in HKCU to name the two most common) then delete them if you don't want them running at startup.

For example, I just upgraded to Quicktime 7.0 over the weekend. It puts an entry in HKLM's run called "Quicktime Task". That's the blue "Q" in your tray. It's purpose is to keep qt "semi-running" so that the once a week I might click on a link that has an embedded MOV it'll load 5 seconds faster. Not a good use of 8M of RAM in my opinion, so I remove it. Realplayer does something similar. I have a vbscript I wrote that I run as a scheduled task every night that removes entries from all of the startup areas except those I want to keep (I have it e-mail me and tell me about new ones before deleting them so I can be sure I want them removed). I only keep about 3-5 entries in each one. My machine goes from off to working desktop in under a minute, which includes mounting my encrypted partition (I use TrueCrypt on my laptops), and recreating the pagefile (I have my machine delete them at shutdown for security, but mostly to minimize its fragmentation). The majority of the reason for my "slow" boot times is the fact that the laptop drives are only 5400RPM. Stupid slow laptop drives. If you've got faster drives, which I assume you do, then regular maintenance will go a lot further than reinstalling.

To me, reinstalling the OS over and over again seems more like the kind of thing an average joe would do. That's why vendors put restore CDs in their boxes. It's "easier" than actually fixing problems. Me, I think it's just easier to fix things as I go along. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results...well...that's the definition of insanity, isn't it?

 

What, and you didn't know I was insane?

The zombie remark is a good one, I might just want to turn some kind of AV on for that purpose, obviously having my PC full of virusses is my business but I don't want to bother other people with it.
The thing is, I prefer to put my maintenance time into one weekend every so many months, than having to do it for a few minutes every week. I don't run my PC overnight due to power consumption and therefore don't run things nightly, and quite frankly can't be bothered to spend time weekly to check up on my system.

In any case, I prefer to reinstall periodically, simply to clean out all the trash that I don't know about that's accumulated on my PC (perhaps due to my lack of AV software), and to me, it's the simplest way of restoring my PC back to the nippy thing it's supposed to be. I'm used to doing it and it doesn't cost me much effort, so why not? The re-tweaking takes me all of an hour and I enjoy doing so. Maybe it's only a placebo, but it gives me something to do over the weekend anyway.

As to running Konfabulator:
I have a window in my case and 2 CCFL's which have no functional purpose whatsoever except to look fancy. Same with Konfabulator, simple 'nuff.

 

Okay, I've checked out Konfabulator and actually like it... a little. It's fast, it has goody little 'widgets' and so and so on... so much for the obvious... But it's not as flexible as I would like to.

I did a bit of googling and found Samurize! Now, here's a damn flexible tool for all of your desktop-modding needs. It may have a bit steeper learning-curve, but once you got a hang of the basics, you'll never need another desktop-modding tool again! I'll guarantee that!

 

Most machines benefit from a clean install after a certain amount of time, not least due to the pile up of apps which are installed/modified/removed leaving a load of crap around your system.. your registry gets bigger, HDD space shrinks, things get loaded into memory and don't remove themselves properly.

Sure if you install one set of apps at the start then do nothing but run those apps, never upgrade drivers and do the same thing every day then you'll likely not need a reinstall. However, if you're like me and basically drive your PC into the ground installing, modifying and removing things left, right and centre then you will benefit from a fresh, clean install every so often to remove the detritus left behind.

And to me and most other people it seems exactly the opposite. You average joe wouldn't dare reinstall, they'd just get wound up in a mess of trying to fix various problems and leave themselves with something unmanageable and like trying to navigate round a system with treacle like responsiveness, when they should really reinstall.

 

You put into words exactly what I couldn't. Agreed with the entire post I also have a habit of installing/uninstalling about 10 apps a week