XP to Windows 7 transition

Topic

New Reply

I’ve been using Windows 7 on my laptop for about a year, but I just transitioned my main desktop computer from XP. There are a couple of things that I used to do in XP that I can’t do in 7 and I’m wondering if they are possible, but I just don’t know how. I don’t even know how to phrase a search to find out if these are already solved problems.

In XP you could drag My Computer to the edge of your screen and it would open up and leave an easy to access list of all of your drives without constantly having to open My Computer. Thus far the closest that I’ve been able to come to this is make shortcuts to all of my drives and line them up on one side, but even then they are still double- rather than single- click items.

In XP you could have a web page on your active desktop. While I generally don’t find this to be a great thing, I found a great use for it that I now miss. I have a weather station that broadcasts to a small web page and I used to like to show this page on a portion of my screen so that I always knew what was happening outside. Is there a way to do something similar in Windows 7?

Thanks for your thoughts and comments.

Reply | Quote

Replies

For the last there are, or rather were, widgets. I say were because Microsoft and Yahoo! do not support them anymore but they’re still around. AccuWeather.com has some for example that cover local weather. I have one from AccuWeather thru Stardock themes that sits in the upper right corner and gives me current conditions and two day forecast.

32619-AccuWeather

For the stand alone toolbar that you created by dragging My Computer to the edge of the desktop; alas it is no longer available in Win 7. You can still manually create a new “Drives” toolbar and make shortcuts to each drive and put them in the Drives folder you create, but the toolbar has to remain a part of the taskbar.

32620-Drives-toolbar

Reply | Quote

You can also change the double click to single click in folder options:

32621-SingleClick

Reply | Quote

The toobar trick is pretty good. It takes one more click than the old way, but it works pretty well.

The weather gadget is not quite as good of a solution. The weather information that I’m trying to reference is from my own weather station and I put this information into a web format. I could possibly write an app that would read the information and display it, but with a website I could display the information of a locked-down corporate computer and I can’t run an app there.

Reply | Quote

Starting with Vista and continuing with Win7, Microsoft removed the “active desktop” capability. You can no longer set a web page as your wallpaper. You’d have to find a third party program that would do something similar.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote