Fixing The Desktop

Microsoft has added a ton of features to the Windows desktop over the years that make it easier on the eyes, faster to use, and generally more fun. Unfortunately, many of these features are turned off by default. Here's how to turn them back on.

When Microsoft first started shipping Windows version 3 (the first version of the software that was worth having), computers were about 1,000 times slower than they are today. As a result, those ancient 1980s computers did a miserable job at moving images from one part of the screen to another. Microsoft dealt with this limitation by having the computer simply show outlines when you tried to resize or drag a window from one location to another, rather than displaying the window's actual contents. Today's video subsystems are much faster. Optimized for playing first-person shooter games, they can resize a window or drag it around the screen without breaking a sweat.  Microsoft, however, is still shipping Windows with a video configuration that it established nearly two decades ago.

To bring your desktop experience up to date, right-click your mouse on the computer's desktop and select "Properties." Then select "Appearance" on the Display Properties panel, and click the button labeled "Effects" Check the box that says: "Show window contents while dragging."

While you're at it, you might want to disable the transition between menus or enable the shadows; that's your business.

One of the great things about Windows XP is that you can switch between different users on the same computer without having to exit all of your applications. Unfortunately, in an effort to make the computer more secure, the default XP screen saver takes you back to the login screen every time the machine is idle for more than five minutes. You can end this annoying behavior by selecting the "Screen Saver" tab of the "Display Properties" panel and unchecking the box that says "On resume, display Welcome screen." Pick a better screen saver while you're at it.

Better Menus

Back when Windows 2000 hit the streets, Microsoft made a fundamental change to the menus in many of its applications-a change that has been giving users headaches ever since. The innovation was called "personalized menus." Different people use different menu commands, the theory went, so why show everybody every menu option all the time? Instead, personalized menus show each user just the most commonly used menus, and hide the rest under some kind of disclosure tab. XP does this with a vengeance, hiding programs in the Start menu under an icon that says "All Programs" and revealing only a few choice programs in the Start Menu.

In my experience, however, users find personalized menus confusing. The reason is that people have been trained over the past decade that the menus on a graphical user interface show all of the commands that are available at any given time. Hide the commands, and most users can't figure out what to do.

Windows XP complicates matters further banishing the "My Computer" and "My Documents" icons from the desktop and moving them to the Start Menu. The default desktop is now reserved for icons of Microsoft programs like Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Outlook, and so on. Other programs that you might install fill up the desktop with their own advertisements; Michelle's desktop has an icon for Dell Media Experience, iTunes, and QuickTime Player, among others.

I may be old fashioned, but both the novice and the experienced users that I've worked with prefer the pre-XP desktop. The good news is that it's easy to restore Windows XP to a more familiar Windows 98/2000 experience-and improve usability at the same time. Here's how:

First, right-click the Windows XP start button and select "Properties." This will display a panel labeled "Taskbar and Start Menu Properties." Then select the tab that says "Taskbar." Uncheck the boxes that say "Lock the taskbar," (so you can modify it) as well as "Auto-hide the taskbar" (so that you don't lose it) and "Group similar taskbar buttons" (so that each window will have its own button in the taskbar).

I also like unchecking "Hide inactive icons" so that I know about every program that's running in the background. Make sure that "Keep the taskbar on top of other windows" and "Show Quick Launch" are checked.  (The "Quick Launch" bar is the group of tiny application-starting buttons that go next to the Start button. You can add your own programs here by dragging their icons to the Quick Launch bar.) When you are done, it should look like this: