Spring Cleaning

Most people this season of the year spend a lot of time spring cleaning their house.  Instead, I spent this week spring cleaning my computer.

It’s really a weird futuristic age we are in when you can have a dirty computer and a clean computer.  No, I am not talking about dirty and clean as in what kind of files you have.  What I mean is wether or not your desktop is cluttered or clean, and wether or not your file structure is chaotic or organized.   This week I finished making my desktop look a lot better, and organized all my music, videos, pictures into subfolders for an all around more effecient computing experience.

When I first started off, my desktop looked like this:

Before

And afterward I ended up with this beautiful desktop:

After

If you click on the images for a full view you will get a much better idea of the changes.  My old desktop was okay, pretty standard and full of clutter though.  In my new one I have managed to make it all flow pretty nicely together.

I had to remove all text from my icons, which is a bitch to do in Vista.  Next, I got a themed image for all of my icon pictures.  After that I had to line them all up with my new background, change the time and local temperature to be on my desktop (still updating every minute), and then came the harder parts.  Making three icons in Vista to immediately shut down, restart, or log off your computer was a major pain.  However, it wasn’t nearly as hard as removing the shortcut arrow in Vista.  I managed to find a tool on the Internet that would remove it, however it does not work on a 64 bit system or from one of Vistas security patches.  So, I had to change some things in the registry to make it not pull for that arrow anymore.

Once all the aesthetic changes were done, it was time to add certain modifications to my desktop.  One of them is that my Twitter feed comes through the blue box on the right of the desktop, which I blurred out some of the tweets for the screencap in this post.  Around the Twitter box is three other important boxes, which instead of links to applications, monitor my system.  They show how much RAM is currently being used, CPU usage, and amount of remaining HDD space in drive C.  The final one is a nice thing called Launchy, which is that bar up at the top of the screen.  It is a lot quicker than standard Windows Search, while only searching relevant things, and opening them with just a click from the enter key.

All of the things being used to do all of this surprisingly only put me up to 1-3% CPU usage normally, which is great.  The main reason I tend to avoid these types of modifications is that they can make things run a little laggy.

Let me know what you think of it in the comments.  Or else.

-That One Person