MrWoodleigh

New Tablet PC

Like many students and teachers at Emma Willard, I’m going to be spending a fair amount of time computing on a Tablet PC.  

During the last 2 or 3 years, I’ve spent about 90% of my computing time on one of two Macs.  My home computer is an iBook.  I’ve been taking it into work from time to time, mainly to take notes at meetings.  At work, my primary computer has been an 6-year old G4 tower.  I’ve also been using an old PC laptop (with a dead battery) for network administrative tasks and to respond to Outlook meeting invitations (long story).

The new Tablet PC has replaced the old PC laptop.   I’m in the process of rearranging my desk so that the Tablet will be front and center, my primary device.  I’ll use the G4 for Mac-only applications.  That will make me more 50/50: mainly PC at work and mainly Mac at home.

Adjustments: Part I

So now I’m trying to make the Tablet PC comfortable, which for me can mean more Mac-like, but not generally.   I customize my Mac interface a lot, too.  Part of what prompts me to make changes is that I use many applications and I usually have several applications open at once.   I want to be able to find things quickly and figure out the state of my computer quickly. 

Among the changes I’ve made:

1. Expanded the Task Bar to double height and told it
   1. Not to hide inactive icons
   2. Show Quick Launch. 
   3. Not to group similar taskbar buttons
2. Started populating the Quick Launch toolbar with the programs that I call frequently:  Firefox, Outlook, SharpReader (my RSS Reader), etc.  The Quick Launch toolbar comes with a very important icon that, when clicked, minimizes every window to the Task Bar.   I don’t know how Windows users can live without that button.   It’s not only a time-saver, it can be used to fix the not uncommon situation where a window that needs attention ends up hidden underneath other windows.  Clearing the screen, then maximizing the windows often reveals the hidden bugger.
3. Cleared nearly every icon off the desktop by either deleting them or moving them to the Quick Launch area.   I hate having to look for things under things.
4. One of the most broken parts of the Windows interface is the All Programs list the Start Menu.  In order to invoke a program that isn’t available via Quick Launch or desktop shortcut, users have to click on the Start Menu (or press the Start Menu key), then move their mouse to All Programs (or use arrow keys), then search through what can be a very long and unordered list.  I brought some order to that list by right-clicking on the expanded All Programs menu and choosing "Sort by name", which helped, although even a sorted list segregates the groups from the singletons.  Try it, you’ll see what I mean.  It’s dumb.  I also used tricks (that require Administrative access and some knowledge of the file system to pull off) to radically shorten the All Programs list.  I created two groups (actually folders) within All Programs, Seldom Used and Quick Launch, and moved most of the shortcuts into one of those two folders.  Quick Launch holds those items that I can call from the Quick Launch toolbar. After ruthlessly altering the list,  I install a tool that insures I’ll hardly ever have to look at it.
5. I installed Launchy.  I plan to blog about Launchy later.  In a nutshell,  Launchy presents a search box.  You type a few letters into the box, such as "pai",  and it responds with a list of the programs whose names contains those letters, including Microsoft Paint, which is what I had in mind.  You choose the one you want and it launches it for you.  Launchy looks in your Start Menu for program names. Interestingly,  Vista, the soon-to-be-released successor to Microsoft Windows XP, which have something like Launchy built into the Start Menu.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 2:49 pm and is filed under PC Tools, Technology and. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.