Screen capture of your desktop!

[jscheuer1]

2/3rds actual size and optimized:

http://home.comcast.net/~jscheuer1/side/desktop_4_o.jpg

[Twey]

Yes, one of the big annoyances for me on both *nix and Windows is the absence of a panel that can render text vertically. It should be fairly easy to render text each letter below the last, but for some reason it's never been implemented. This would be especially handy since there are some languages that are actually written this way — I've really always preferred my panels on the right-hand side, as I think is featured in one of my Konqueror screenshots up there somewhere *waves vaguely up the thread* where I used an icons-only view. I think this is mostly caused by a lack of support for vertical text at a toolkit level. A lot of browsers still lack support for the tb-lr and tb-rl text directions of CSS, too.

That's an awful lot of icons you've got there. How do you ever find anything? Your systray looks like you're running just about every app known to man, too. Have you been noticing slowdowns recently?

Nice background though. Very scenic.

[jscheuer1]

A lot of what is in the systray is disabled. I chose an option that shows disabled items (some of these have slashes through them, others are simply off), so that they may be easily activated when needed. Some of it is also the odd habit of Opera and EditPad to appear in the systray even though they are just ordinary applications.

What's actually running there are - volume control (hardly worth mentioning), the ATi monitor application, virtual sound, power/battery monitor, printer, CD/DVD silencer, AVG Anti-Virus, and SpyBot.

Oh, and I happen to have TaskManager running there too in that shot because I've been testing a new script visa vis memory leaks in IE. Usually that one's not there.

I do tend to allow a lot of application icons pile up on the desktop. I'm so used to it, it actually helps me find things. However, the most frequently used items (image and text editors, browsers, calculator and my one game I like - wintris), are in the start menu at the top level.

The image is from Cadillac Mountain, Mount Dessert Island, ME, snapped by yours truly during sunset.

[Twey]

A lot of what is in the systray is disabled.

But still resident in memory.

Some of it is also the odd habit of Opera and EditPad to appear in the systray even though they are just ordinary applications.

Big applications nowadays often preload themselves — that is, store themselves in memory and perform initialisation so that they load much faster when you want them. That means that they're taking up about as much memory as if they were actually running.

I do tend to allow a lot of application icons pile up on the desktop. I'm so used to it, it actually helps me find things. However, the most frequently used items (image and text editors, browsers, calculator and my one game I like - wintris), are in the start menu at the top level.

Not just applications — there's even a favicon.ico there Whatever works for you, I guess, but especially if you don't use them much, you might consider clearing it up occasionally: as I recall, having a large number of icons on the desktop fairly drastically increases the time taken to log in, on Windows.

The image is from Cadillac Mountain, Mount Dessert Island, ME, snapped by yours truly during sunset.

Good shot! What's your camera?

[Master_script_maker]

[jscheuer1]

It's tough to beat sunrises and sunsets. Who thought those up.

@ Twey,

Camera: Konica Minolta DiMage Z6

I've decided it was time to do a bit of pruning, got rid of some icons. However, Opera and EditPad, they are strange. The do not appear in the tray until launched - it's a weird thing. My understanding is that they just go there after launch to be available from more than one location. If closed, they disappear from the tray. Most of the other tray apps I either want or have also now gotten rid of.

[mburt]

He must work for the FBI with that kind of drive name :P.

[magicyte]

How do you like my Windows 7 theme for Vista?

[X96 Web Design]

@Twey:
One mixer is for the "Master Volume" and another directly controls my speakers. I use headphones now and then for audio stuff and it helps to have two...

And I blurred the drive name because it had my initials in it... Didn't want to give out my "personal information"!

[Twey]

I'm sure nobody's going to track you down with just your initials But OK.

I see — I usually just set all my other devices to maximum and then controll the whole using the master. You can double-click the mixer to get a full mixer application with all your channels, you know.