That's it, I am going to talk about it over and over and over again. Until I probably break the little evil thing: I got myself a netbook.
We are far from the specs of an Eee-pc, I mean by that far above. Well except the battery life, which is far beneath.
Now, my working environment, I mean in the office, is Windows based. I would love to share the linuxian adventures of the lost expat, but that will be for another time, when I actually benefit from ingesting hundreds of man pages to run Firefox.
For now, I would like to share some easy tricks to not fall into the
Pit Of Teh Bad Usars who illegally pirate our software while neglecting the marvelous work of O-so-many open source developers.
This post is the first of a couple that will guide you into the tweaking and optimization of small / slow lap resting devices.
Notice that these advices won't just allow you to save some space, but can also make you work much, much faster (works for me).
1) Get rid of Vista
Enough said, let's get serious.
2) Make it practical
Yes, I say it as I think it, it's not because it's small that it needs to look bloated.
You have purchased a little device, with a cramped keyboard, no need to cramp the display as well.
Since you probably do not have the graphic power that goes with a top notch NVidia GPU, you cannot afford to install, for instance, Kubuntu, and the superb all flowing, all spinning effects that go with KDE.
Either your laptop is too slow to allow you the install of any extra software and you can simply hide (most of the time) the task bar, either you have some extra memory and some solutions are available to make you desktop look good, which is a plus.
Getting rid of the Task Bar.
Windows tends to get a firm grasp on its awefull, non tweakable, non resizable task bar occupying some needed bottom-pixels. We will have to find a replacement for the task manager (the little squares with the app names on it), the start button, the quick launch icons and the system tray (little icons on the right).
What you actually don't need:
- The start button (Squashed by the "win" key):
On 99% of the keyboards I have seen,
just next to the "alt" key, you can find the "win" key, which will call the Windows start menu from mostly everywhere.
Faster, easier, you don't even need to move your mouse.
- The Task Manager (Owned by "alt+tab"):
You actually don't need that. You could think seeing your opened applications on the bottom of your screen is useful, but do you really juggle between THAT much apps? Oh, and I forget, if you have a netbook, you won't be able to anyway, these babies are not really famous for their processing power.
A very handy keyboard shortcut,
"alt+tab" (tab being the key just above capslock) will allow you to switch between applications.
- The Quick Launch shortcuts (Pwned by you!)
Launching quickly an application with Windows XP without over loading your desktop can become a terrible pain if you don't know the following trick:
Go to
c:\windows\system32 and place there a shortcut to your favorite applications.
Press
"win"+ r , type in the name of one of the shortcuts you just made. O joy, the application starts!
This trick is even more useful when you know that some applications such as Mozilla Firefox don't even need the shortcut to be created beforehand.
If you have followed me until now, you can now right click on you task bar, take a look at its properties, and realize that yes, you can actually hide it and forget about with.
Almost.
Here comes the troublemaker.
The system tray (nasty little rogue)
Well... you just don't need it. You would try accessing it to meddle with the sound settings, but when you can do it with the keyboard shortcuts provided directly on your keyboard.
Nonetheless, some mischievous applications such as YM! our the most dreaded Outlook tend to squat the lot, and you will need to invoke your task bar every now and then in order to find them back.
In the neat future I will tell you how to definitely replace it while adding some eye-candy to the geek-ism, stay tuned.
