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Posts Tagged ‘taskbar’

My Windows 7 Woes Resolved (ObjectDock)

03 Aug

I’ve put up with the one single thing annoying me in Windows 7 for far too long now. Yesterday I just lost it and started searching for a solution to my problem.

The problem is that the Windows 7 taskbar does some annoying new things which you are stuck with because somewhere between one of the release candidates of Windows 7 and the final code, some bright spark at Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to force everyone into using the new taskbar without being able to turn off the annoying features as you could do in the past and also in past flavours of Windows.

There are suggested solutions for stopping taskbar thumbnail previews none of which work, there is a setting in the group policy editor that Microsoft included but changing the setting does not work on all version of Windows 7 least of all in Windows 7 Ultimate X64. Then I came across a taskbar tweak utility for Windows 7 which kinda works but depending on a how a piece of software is written it can quickly make it not work. These thumbnails are definitely something written into each piece of software and few if any developers give you an option to disable that annoying feature. Mozilla Firefox is one that does it occasionally, it depends on the version of Firefox which changes rapidly.Older versions of software do not do it.

Ok so none of these fixes produced the desired result. I then decided to switch Windows 7 to a non-aero theme thereby disabling all the niceties of Windows 7 turning it back to an almost XP style look. BORING !!!! Why have Windows 7 and an awesome graphics cards if you’re not going to run Aero???

This afternoon I decided to try ObjectDock from Stardock which is a complete replacement taskbar for Windows operating systems. Boy was I surprised after I installed it and I wonder where has this been all my life. Okay, let me be honest, I’ve always know about Objectdock but I never tried it as I thought it was simply some flashy add on for Windows and we tend to think how can people do better than Microsoft. Well I can say one thing this new taskbar replacement kicks some royal Windows 7 @ss.

It has the ability to hide the windows taskbar altogether YAY !!!
It has ONE icon for a running program regardless of how many windows that program has open YAY !!!
It’s lightweight – currently using less than 3MB of Ram YAY !!!
It’s much nicer looking, like the OSx menubar
AND
It obeys my commands.

I have Aero back and a great looking and functioning taskbar.

If you’ve had enough of the annoying Windows 7 taskbar try Objectdock, the free version is more than adequate. You’ll be surprised.

PS – I don’t work for them :D

 
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Posted in Technology and Computing

 

Taskbar Thumbnails – The biggest annoyance of Microsoft Windows 7 and it’s not possible to turn it off.

02 Aug

I love Windows 7, it’s by far the fastest and most stable version of Windows ever. I’ve been running it for over 18 months without a single glitch. There is however one major annoyance of Windows 7 and that is Taskbar Thumbnails. No doubt the feature was added to boost productivity but it actually does the opposite and one wonders where Microsoft does their product testing or how they arrive at these silly software additions.

First of all in Windows 7 32-bit you can disable this feature but the same setting used to disable it in the 32-bit version of the Operating system does not work for the 64-bit version, so much for shared code across both platforms, hmmm. There is a workaround for the 64-bit version which is to extend the MouseHoverTime but really this is an incredibly stupid workaround. Why Microsoft does not allow users of their software to simply disable new additions is beyond me. It’s just as easy to code an ON as well as an OFF option at the time of programming but fixes like this get stifled in red tape after the product has launched …. it’s doubtful any service pack (as history has shown) will address such a bug and yes it IS A BUG. Past service packs for all Microsoft OS’s seldom address changes like this and users have to hope that Windows 8 will allow us to turn it off. I’m not holding my breath though. I’m hoping for a third party utility that can properly address it.

I’ve been a Microsoft user since before Windows, since Dos 1.0 days, and every version of Windows has had the ability to turn off all the annoying new features and strip it down to the old way users like to do things. But no …. with Windows 7 Microsoft has decided they will not allow us to do that. Unless of course we decide to completely turn off Windows Aero which is responsible for this incredibly stupid behaviour. That kind of solution kind of defeats even having any of the niceties of Windows 7.

I wish Microsoft would learn to respect users of their software who have been around since day one, users who have helped shape their software over all these years. Not being able to turn off these features is annoying to power users and these features waste more time than the time they were designed to help save.

 
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Posted in Technology and Computing

 
 
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