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I offered Tina from Recommended the opportunity to write a post for my page, as she is my Featured Site this week. Please show her some click love and enjoy this post about customizing your visual workspace.
First of all I want to thank Jester for having me as a guest this week and offering me to write a guest post. I hope you all will enjoy it.
Humans in general are visual individuals. Besides recognizing smells and sounds, they judge things by the way they look. The look of your apartment or workplace for example is your everyday first impression of the day that lies ahead of you. Want to kick off your day in a good mood? Make sure your home isn’t messy, clean your dirty dishes every night, let some fresh air in to chase bad odors out and have a good smelling coffee, tea or hot chocolate in the morning. There are all these little things you can do that don’t cost much but have massive effects.
Do you work a lot on your computer? What does it look like? Default Wallpaper, default settings, desktop littered with icons and shortcuts and you can’t find stuff anymore? Do you have the freedom to change some of that? Well, if you answered yes I guess it is time to Pimp Your PC! That is if you can spare some graphics and main memory.
Let’s start with the most simple bit: changing your wallpaper. The resources are endless. Try searching Google for “wallpaper” and you will be flooded with links, some good, some bad, some evil. I used to browse the archives at deviantART and I’m sure it’s still a great place for awesome wallpapers and more. However, these days my favorite is Pixelgirl Presents. All of my recent wallpapers were found on this site and you can see an example below.
What else can you see on the screenshot of my desktop?
One of the most apparent features of my desktop is that it is almost empty. No nasty shortcuts block the view of this beautiful wallpaper. How can I do that and still work effectively? My shortcuts live elsewhere! They resides in my Stardock ObjectDock which can be seen in the top left corner. This program is not free, although the Mac-kinda Taskbar (not shown) used to be. Unfortunately Stardock doesn’t offer it for free download any longer. If you want to know more about this program read this article I wrote back in January.
Other than buying/installing a program that holds your icon you can also utilize Toolbars that sit in the Windows Taskbar. I recently wrote an article on how this is done.
Back to my desktop. There is a calendar in the top right corner. It’s called Rainlendar, the best desktop calendar you will ever find. It’s nicely customizable, supports incredibly many languages, there are hundreds of beautiful skins available online, e.g. at WinCustomize, it’s completely free and I love all that.
In the bottom right corner of my screen you see the recycle bin and some little thingies floating around it. There are techniques with which you can remove or hide the recycle bin icon, however I never bothered. The little notes arranged around that icon are Desktop Post-It Notes. Again this used to be a free program which was suspended or rather made available for purchase. You can download a free copy of the colored notes here.
Finally there is my Taskbar. I do use Windows XP, however I applied a Vista Transformation Pack and that is why my Taskbar looks so different. You can change the default color of your Taskbar in the same menu in which you would change your wallpaper. That is right-click on your desktop and choose “properties”. Then switch to the tab called “display” and see what you like. If you want a root-deep change of your Windows look you will have to install a new theme. Search XPthemes and read the tech-recipes article on changing the XP theme.
That is not all you can do to pimp and tweak your system. There are dozens of programs that enhance the Windows user experience. Stuff Microsoft so far hasn’t come up with but some smart programmers have and most of them offer their work for free. Now I could go on and on but I’m sure this article already is too long. So in order not to tax Jester’s patience any more I will stop here with a few references to articles I have written in my blog.
Deskloops - put your open applications into a virtual loop
Taskbar Shuffle - re-arrange windows displayed in your Windows taskbar
Launchy - find and launch any file on your computer with less than three clicks
Qliner hotkeys- assign hotkeys where you want them
Windows XP Tips- the complete guide for everything I might have missed to tell you about.
Thanks, Tina! I’m a Mac user myself, but I know that most of the people reading my blog are PC users, and are sure to find some helpful hints here, or over at your site!
