I recently upgraded to windows 7 from XP, and I hate the new interface. There are a few critical issues for me - I got my home and work PC's "upgraded" at around the same time. It's significantly reduced my productivity on the job and at home, and bothers me enough that it reduces my inclination to do things on the computer.
Have already switched to classic skin, and removed all the cruft from the new explorer/file manager (the panes on both sides, the huge bulky thing that went where the status bar was, and the folder band - those new features took up about 40% of the pixels in a folder window, and I can't afford to waste screenspace like that).
1) In windows XP, you could only have one folder window open for a given folder (trying to open another would bring you to the one currently open). In windows 7, this is no longer enforced, and i end up building up redundant folder windows. This behaves inconsistently. I want this to act like XP.
2) In windows XP, there was less padding around the text in taskbar entries (i have taskbar grouping turned off, I hate the taskbar grouping, in XP and in 7 - it was always the first thing i turned off). Now, the first letter of taskbar entries gets hidden with far fewer programs opened. That, combined with issue 4 below, makes finding open programs take an extra menu operation (hover over entry in task bar, then find the right one on the stupid popup window).
3) In windows XP, the task bar icons were ordered in order that they were opened, making it easy to go back to the last task you had open. Now, instead, they're sorted first by program, then by the order you opened them. This sounds innocent, but it sucks, because you can't, say... go back to the folder you had open right before opening a file in it (by looking for the icon of the file you opened, and then looking 1 spot to the left). Moreover, while they're sorted by program, the programs appear to be ordered randomly. Sometimes a program will show up in the middle of the task bar, even when there aren't any other instances of the program open.
Now, chosing programs on the task bar generally end up requiring two mouse movements a hover, and a click, instead of 1 movement and 1 click. As a hard-core multitasker (on winXP, I would frequently be near the point where the 2-row tall taskbar would start scrolling on a 1440 pixel wide screen), this is a real problem for me.
4) Under windows XP, when you told the computer to shut down, while there was an application with an open file, you would be prompted to save it, and could choose whether to do so.
Under windows 7, it will prevent you from interacting with the application to tell it whether/how to save, until you cancel the shutdown, tell it to save, and then tell it to shut down again. And then you cancel it again, because there's another program asking something. Repeat several times.
Usually these are things like notepad files with a url or something that I was copy/pasting to remove formatting from text - but you can't check without canceling the shut down, canceling the "do you want to save dialog" and quitting or saving. (Speaking of which, anyone know a way to copy or paste just raw text? Sometimes it's nice to keep the formatting, but usually it's just a pain in the ass)
5) I've disabled that screen-space hog at the bottom of the explorer window that replaced the nice, neat, status bar in XP, and turned back on the old one.
However, now, it doesn't display anything other than the number of files selected - in the past, it would display file size as well. Which is the whole point of using the status bar.
6) Not a big deal, but is it possible to make windows only shade the icon when you're viewing a folder as "medium icons", instead of the icon plus the background around it?
Thanks in advance everyone.
Have already switched to classic skin, and removed all the cruft from the new explorer/file manager (the panes on both sides, the huge bulky thing that went where the status bar was, and the folder band - those new features took up about 40% of the pixels in a folder window, and I can't afford to waste screenspace like that).
1) In windows XP, you could only have one folder window open for a given folder (trying to open another would bring you to the one currently open). In windows 7, this is no longer enforced, and i end up building up redundant folder windows. This behaves inconsistently. I want this to act like XP.
2) In windows XP, there was less padding around the text in taskbar entries (i have taskbar grouping turned off, I hate the taskbar grouping, in XP and in 7 - it was always the first thing i turned off). Now, the first letter of taskbar entries gets hidden with far fewer programs opened. That, combined with issue 4 below, makes finding open programs take an extra menu operation (hover over entry in task bar, then find the right one on the stupid popup window).
3) In windows XP, the task bar icons were ordered in order that they were opened, making it easy to go back to the last task you had open. Now, instead, they're sorted first by program, then by the order you opened them. This sounds innocent, but it sucks, because you can't, say... go back to the folder you had open right before opening a file in it (by looking for the icon of the file you opened, and then looking 1 spot to the left). Moreover, while they're sorted by program, the programs appear to be ordered randomly. Sometimes a program will show up in the middle of the task bar, even when there aren't any other instances of the program open.
Now, chosing programs on the task bar generally end up requiring two mouse movements a hover, and a click, instead of 1 movement and 1 click. As a hard-core multitasker (on winXP, I would frequently be near the point where the 2-row tall taskbar would start scrolling on a 1440 pixel wide screen), this is a real problem for me.
4) Under windows XP, when you told the computer to shut down, while there was an application with an open file, you would be prompted to save it, and could choose whether to do so.
Under windows 7, it will prevent you from interacting with the application to tell it whether/how to save, until you cancel the shutdown, tell it to save, and then tell it to shut down again. And then you cancel it again, because there's another program asking something. Repeat several times.
Usually these are things like notepad files with a url or something that I was copy/pasting to remove formatting from text - but you can't check without canceling the shut down, canceling the "do you want to save dialog" and quitting or saving. (Speaking of which, anyone know a way to copy or paste just raw text? Sometimes it's nice to keep the formatting, but usually it's just a pain in the ass)
5) I've disabled that screen-space hog at the bottom of the explorer window that replaced the nice, neat, status bar in XP, and turned back on the old one.
However, now, it doesn't display anything other than the number of files selected - in the past, it would display file size as well. Which is the whole point of using the status bar.
6) Not a big deal, but is it possible to make windows only shade the icon when you're viewing a folder as "medium icons", instead of the icon plus the background around it?
Thanks in advance everyone.
