Making Windows Suck Less
As always, for our less tech-inclined crowed: scintillating tales, elicit pics and candid film of mostly fly and oft aggressive lesbians are readily available here and here.
I gotta into a discussion with Geezy last night about my philosophy on buying a new Mac Book so I could run Parallels or such on native Intel to have a Windows test environment handy. My thoughts: I got a workhorse Powerbook I snagged of Amazon for about half what a new Mac Book would cost, and picked up a shiny HP Win box floor model avec widescreen monitor, 400 gig drive & TV tuner card + PVR software for about half less than that. The catch is that I don’t get super fast Windows emulation when I’m on the road, having to return to the tower to test. Also, since I bothered to get the tower at all feels like I should use it…so thanks to JayShutUp & Lady Michi now I got a fucking Warcraft addiction. But I also get Windows Media Center with a IR remote and such, which is pretty nice after not having TV around for the last couple of years.
It’s been a while since I had Windows as my everyday OS, and it’s been a bit of a hassle re-learning how to deal with the constant “why the fuck is it telling me that?” user experience inherent to Microsoft’s software. But overall I’ve been able to get a decent environment config’d and I must admit (though quietly around fellow Mac fan boys like Rocket and Orion): I’m kinda digging on my PC.
Helpful to the whole experience have been the following apps and add-ons, which have proven to make Windows suck far less than usual:
Launchy - file launcher
Running Quicksilver as keystroke-based file launcher for OS X is much more intuitive to me than the traditional desktop icon + program menu item metaphor. Launchy does the same thing for Windows. And it’s free.
Sandboxie - sandbox environment manager
Run apps, including web browsers, in a virtual machine. Fuck up the virtual? Won’t impact your real OS install. Open source.
Web-Developer Server Suite - WAMP, WAMP, baby.
Dead simple to install and config Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP web-server distribution for Windows. Free like beer.
ShellEnhancer - Windows UI add-on
Adds a bunch of features, adjust others, to make Windows not look but act a bit more like OS X. Double click menu bars to roll up windows. Minimize apps to sys tray with middle mouse click. Other neato stuff I haven’t dug into 100% yet.
ColorPic - Color, um, picker.
Stop opening Photoshop just to get the hex color off an image. Slightly silly UI, but small footprint and does the same gig as ExColor on OS X.
TightVNC - Free VNC Server
This plus Chicken of the VNC as my Mac client actually do let me take the box on the road. Latency issues once in a while but again: free like a pint.
E - Text Editor - Textmate for Windows.
If you use Textmate at all, you know why this pretty sweet.
InfranView - image viewer.
Lightweight & quick + does a lot of the simpler tasks of Photoshop.