Cleaning Your Windows

If you're stuck in the rut of the default settings that Microsoft applies to its software, you're missing out: Here's as guide to customizing your system to strip away annoying "features" and enhance usability.

By Simson Garfinkel

January 28, 2004

Late last year I bought a new computer for the hip 23-year-old artist who sits for my children.  I wanted to buy her a Macintosh, because that's what artists seem to prefer, but the cost differential between a Mac and a Windows machine ended up being hundreds of dollars. So the sitter-let's call her Michelle-got a Dell.

Thinking that Michelle was an expert at these sorts of things, I simply left the Dell and a monitor at her door. A few days later when she had the whole thing set up and was happily chugging along, I stopped by to see how things were working out for her. And I was shocked.

Michelle is by no means a computer neophyte: I've long admired what she is able to do with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. But like most PC users, I guess, she was using the default settings for most of the applications software as well as for parts of the operating system. So I sat down with her and started making changes that, in my opinion, would make the system more usable.

The whole process was surreal. After all, Microsoft has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make Windows XP and Office XP more usable, and here I was, systematically turning off many of the new "features" that Microsoft had added, and turning on others-all in an effort to make Microsoft's out-of-the-box system work the way it was supposed to.

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Surreal, perhaps, but completely understandable. That's because many of the "usability" improvements in Windows XP didn't really improve usability. Some of them were put there just so that XP would look different enough from Windows 2000 and Windows ME that users would want to upgrade. Others were added to advertise new features that Microsoft was trying to push into the marketplace. And still others were included as experiments: while Microsoft does do usability studies, there really is no substitute for testing a feature on the open market.

I figure that Michelle is not alone, and that there are a lot of people who don't realize how to make Windows XP a better, more usable work environment. Rather than travel to each person's house and manually reconfigure his or her system, I've decided to put all of my know-how here in this article. If you think that I missed anything, please let me know in the TechnologyReview.com forums.