It’s grim up north

While installing and configuring Windows XP on my girlfriends recently purchased laptop and adding my favourite set of tools and must-haves I stumbled across one of Microsofts power toys called “Task Switcher” (When looking for TweakUI). I’ll talk more about it later on.

I guess everybody has their own favourite set of tools, so as an act of humanity I’ll list some gems from my What Every Windows Machine Should Have To Be Usable-list.

First of all we need a decent editor. This is a very basic function, but ever so important. If you’re stuck without pen and paper and need to scribble down a phone number I guess Notepad will do, but for any operation more advanced than that I suggest you have a look at Notepad++.
It has a ton of features, most of them very good too. It’s free and open source and has a fairly small foot print. I’ve tried a lot of different text editors in my quest for the ultimate one, and for the time being I beleive I’ve found it (at least for the Windows platform).

There’s a lot of picture viewers out there, all of them bragging about the number of formats they can handle, the number of transient effects included for the slideshow mode, all included photoshop-like filters for manipulating pictures and so on. Some of them started as fairly decent applications but got bloated somewhere up the must-include-more-functions-for-next-versions road (this, I think, is applicable for most applications though). Years ago I laid my eyes upon a small, fast and free picture viewer called IrfanView. It’s a great application with a lot of features, but still very small and very fast.

When laying my hands on a fresh installation of Windows XP the first things I do is:

• Change to classic theme and switch color theme (Rainy day FTW!)
• Switch of all unnecessary effects (all of them, that is)
• Modify the Task bar and Start menu to classic look and change some options.
• Modify most of the default settings for folder view.

This doesn’t get me very far in my strive for perfection, so what I do next is usually to download TweakUI from the Microsoft PowerToys site. Here I can get rid of annoyances like the little arrow and “Shortcut to…” on shortcuts, the delays for sub-menus, autoplay, and much more. Now don’t tell me that “menu selection fading” and “list box animation” makes you more productive.
Looking for TweakUI is what made my find TaskSwitcher (found on the same page). I grabbed it for my own Windows box as soon as I could (and I’ll install it and show it off to all of my colleagues tomorrow). It’s a small application that replaces the Alt-Tab behaviour.
Instead of a just a row of icons and a line of text to describe each item it’ll provide you with a screenshot. The performance impact seems to be close to nada. This is what I’ve always wanted, and I didn’t even know about it!

I’ll be back with more must-haves very soon. And I’d love your comment and to get suggestions for even better applications than the ones I’ve listed.