Be Excellent To Each Other

The last windows I used to any serious degree was XP. Never used Vista (played on it for about 5 mins once). That and my knowledge of windows has atrophied greatly.

But now I have a nice version of Windows 7* on my Macbook and it's all pretty and that but whats different? Is there a spotlight alike - as I use that to launch everything on OS X? Whats best for .zips/.rars etc? Does it have decent pdf support and if not is there something better than adobe? Is there a way to get an expose effect?

Basically I would love a little list of what you lot recommend as essential windows apps, games, tips and tricks. What little things does it have that you love? L

Currently I've installed:

• Minecraft
• Desktop Dungeons
• Spelunky
• Steam
• WinRAR

Liking it a lot more than that last time I pottered around with it. Much nicer than I thought.

And the drag the window to the side of the screen to make it take up half is tremendous.

* actually I've had it for ages, but needed to get it working.

Chrome?

Windows Search, at the bottom of the Start Menu by default, is good. Once it's had some time to index. Partial document/program names tapped in and hit enter.

I hide most of the bits in the Start Menu, but make some stuff be pop-out sub-menus instead of items; right-click Start, click Properties. Or something.

Try grabbing a window by its title bar and shaking it - it's supposed to hide all other windows, I think. I also love the hover-over Aero Peek stuff, along with the pinning of windows to the taskbar and Jump Lists.

I use 7-zip for (de)compression. I use Adobe Reader for PDFs, because I'm an idiot. Chrome, web browser for discerning users, has a built-in PDF viewer now though.

Most of the things I have installed are for processing the river of filth that pours into my hard drives each day, so can't really help on other stuff.

Mm, I mostly use my computers for ("renting") TV shows*, buying/ripping/playing music and watching filth, these days. Hardly a power user.

Oh, Open Office does me for writing incensed letters to service providers who need telling to get bent - but Office 2010 actually seems to have useful new features and finally almost be usable, based on my boss' recent investigations.

* I ("rent") such things with uTorrent, because it's good.

Oooh yeah, I'll try chrome.

Jump Lists? What are they?

Does it have a dashboard-a-like? Little widgets and that?

I like the search bar thing a lot. But is there a way to make it pop up with just the keyboard?

Hit the windows key to open the start memu, and it places the cursor in the search box automatically. Not sure what your version of the Windows button would be though...




7zip for sure.

Foobar2000 is my music player of choice, and VLC for the videos.

Chrome is my browser of choice these days.

You should check out photosynth if you've not seen it before (although I have no idea if that still requires windows, it used to require IE)

Also, start reading RPS.

Press the windows key and start typing.

I've read RPS for a long time, despite not having windows! It's a tremendous site (and good work too on it Lewie)

Though I believe Kieron wrote the review of Deadliest Warrior, so I've learnt to be less trusting of him of late.

Foxit Reader is better than Acrobat for PDFs, I reckon. Certainly not as bloated.

Application specific menus - right-click on an icon on the taskbar (pinned or running), or the right-arrow in 'bubble' section of the Start Menu and eg in Chrome you get new tab/window/incognito, history, and so on. Where the app supports them, anyway.

Yeah, there's this little button between the alt and ctrl keys. Been there since 1995.

I'm still not forgiving Microsoft for making the default middle-click behaviour of the taskbar some sort of weird clone-this-program shit, instead of the conventional close-this-fucking-thing. Dicks.

That'll be the cmd button on his Mac keyboard.

Of course, if you're afflicted with Macitis, ctrl-esc will do the job too.

In my XP days pressing the windows button would, 9 times out of 10, cause the machine to crash. Trying it now it's very nice.

Just in case you weren't aware of this, there is a pretty easy fix.

I totally agree with you. I guess it makes sense that middle click on the snap preview closes too.

I didn't know about that. Bloody useful for pinned apps, where left-clicking activates the existing instance instead of a new one.

Since when has "close this fucking thing" been the convention? Is that a Mac, Unix/Linux or both thing?

I never think of doing anything other than scrolling with the middle button. How the hell did we manage without the scroll wheel?

Oh, that is cool. Cheers. I'm currently using a hotscript thing, but it's far from perfect. I'll give that a try.



Middle-click to close is a convention of tabs, I admit, usually in browsers. But extending that to something that's practically a tab-bar is hardly a leap, and certainly less confusing than having things clone themselves. I can't think of a single instance I've wanted to do that, where I wouldn't even begin counting the number of programs I've wanted to close.

I never knew'd' that. I'd always used the little x that's a millimetre of hand movement further over.

I middle-click URLs to open them in new tabs, that's it.
Bugger me, so it is!

Oh ar, I do that.

I middle-click to close tabs all the time. And then, usually, have to go the 'recently closed tabs' list as I've closed more than I originally intended.

Don't be daft, middle-click doesn't close ta

wow learned somethign new...

In firefox, middle click in blank space to the side of tabs will reopen previously closed tab too.

I wish I could find a way to make Chrome do the same..

Well you've got to weigh up the disadvantage of losing that vs the constant crashing and memory leak into the gigabytes.

Exactly, I prefer Chrome for sure, but I wish I could middle click to reopen closed tabs. Don't miss much else from Firefox.

What the hell do you do to it?

I suffer from neither memory leaks* nor crashes in firefoox, and never have in the last 5 or so years I've been using it.

* -and I rarely shut it or the computer down, either.

CTRL+Shift+T will do it, if you didn't already know.

Also in Firefox.

Yeah, I always forget that, cheers.

I've just discovered that middle-clicking a window title bar in Ubuntu sends the window to the back. That could prove quite useful.