That's a little better

[johnridley]

I got fed up and found the spot in Windows 7 to turn off all of the damn animations-the stuff where windows "zoom" up and down instead of just appearing, all the glass window crap, a bunch of other stuff like that. It looks kind of like I'm using an actual operating system again. I did a little work on the taskbar yesterday, it's looking better too.

I'm not really happy with Windows Explorer, that's going to get some work soon too and see what I can do about making that make some kind of sense, hiding the useless crap and bringing up actual useful tools.

What would be perfect would be a Windows 2000 skin, but apparently they've done their best to make that impossible.

Functionally, Windows 7 is a very nice OS, but I really don't like all the window dressing and dancing clowns they've added to it.

EDIT - bonus, I just found how to shut off all the rounded edges on windows and glowy buttons and misshapen system buttons in the upper right corner.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Control Panel - System - Advanced System Settings - Performance/Settings

Start unchecking stuff, click apply, see what it does. Here are the highlights:

Animate controls and elements inside windows
- this shuts off the goofy movies that they play when copying files, and other such wastes of resources.

Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
- this shuts off the zoomy windows - Honestly, this is the one thing that I HAD to shut off, it was driving me absolutely bonkers.

Animations in the taskbar and start menu
- don't know, but I'm sure it's useless.

Use visual styles on windows and buttons
- turning this off shuts off a TON of stuff - you get proper square windows and buttons instead of fisher-price, it turns off the "frosted glass" window frame, disables the "aero peek" stuff on the taskbar (preview of windows when you hover over their icons in the taskbar), the windows-tab tilted selection, and probably other stuff. I actually am not sure whether I like this on or off.