Comments on: Windows 7 Control Panel In Classic Mode

By: pbs

pbs — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:47:11 +0000

As I said before, use 7 Taskbar Tweaker to get control of your taskbar. This one is great. You can even drag the tabs to get the order you want instead of closing and opening the apps in the order you want, like before in XP. With this tweaker and some configuration, my taskbar works just like XP’s, with the advantage or being able to drag the tabs to reorder. None of schizophrenic icons and imposed groupings, all visible and at the distance of one click.

Regarding search, I’ve long uninstalled windows search because it’s completly broken an user-unfriendly. First I tried Everything, now I use Agent Ransack. The tool is pretty good and gets the jobs done, although some searches return crazy multiple results, which happens in both search tools so again it’s probably Win 7 that is broken underneath.

Overall, upgrading from XP to Win7 didn’t bring me much benefit and that’s after all the work to fix the taskbar, find an alternative to search, etc. I have no solution yet for the control panel. It continues to be a pain to find the right icon everytime i need to uninstall an app.

By: Lars Wadefalk

Lars Wadefalk — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:54:50 +0000

On top of all, the Search function (if you ever actually find the damned search field) is completely broken. It doesn’t find things that I have proven is clearly located in the search path/content. I have verified all search options carefully, but still it fails.
What the hell is MS thinking? Search is a BASIC function in an operating system.
I have waited a long time now, still having XP at home, being afraid of upgrading to 7 as I knew they had adopted most things from the Vista user interface. I was thinking about finally going over some time soon.
But now I was given the chance testing it out more thorougly at work, and for sure I will stay with XP on my computers at home.
This is utter crap with no human logic whatsoever.

Luckily enough, my server is Linux.

By: Gabe

Gabe — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:49:17 +0000

It seems we’re the only ones on the interwebs that feel this way though. In fact, I was quite shocked at some of the people defending the new control panel. It’s August 2011 as I write this and every forum that I find has people DEFENDING Control Panel. I was happy to find my fellow ranters!

My turn…

I just want things listed top-to-bottom so that I can sort. Where’s the header so I can click it and SORT…..SORT, that basic functionality that EVERY user interface has ever had…ever. Funny thing is, you can select the View menu (after pressing the ALT key of course…ugh) and you’ll see our coveted options “LIST” and “DETAIL”, but they’re GRAYED OUT….AAAHH! This is basic functionality that shouldn’t have been removed from this frequently visited admin section.

Database 101 allows the sorting (ascending and descending) of a list of items…Control Panel should be no different.

By: Lucy Kelly

Lucy Kelly — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:03:53 +0000

Thank you very much. I am not afraid of some change, but too much change in the wrong areas frustrate me. Some things are best left alone. Thank you very much, I like the ‘classic view’ also.

By: Anon

Anon — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:22:22 +0000

http://www.askvg.com/aio-how-to-get-all-good-old-classic-features-back-in-windows-7/

By: F. Microsoft

F. Microsoft — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:10:07 +0000

Dear major software companies: “invent” and make it “fancy” or “kewl” all you want but PRESERVE FAMILIARITY and preserve the detailed list, classic view, always, at all times, with granular OPTIONS.

By: frank_lucifer

frank_lucifer — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:54:09 +0000

my theory is, that they looked up some new psychological studies. it’s seems quite proven that people learn better, if they have to “work” more to obtain the information the are looking for. e.g. information that’s deciphered from a nearly illegible font is more likely to stay in your brain than text that’s easy to read. so, microsoft decided to educate their users and make it as hard and unintuitive as possible to use their OS.

and, on the other hand, there’s that old microsoft tradition that if something has worked well on macOS for some years, it must be copied (and broken in the process).

By: pbs

pbs — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:10:14 +0000

7 Taskbar Tweaker and Agent Ransack to get back in control of your taskbar and have a search that works.

By: wildcatherder

wildcatherder — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:52:48 +0000

Administrators look at a LOT of control panels. The lack of a details view for the Control Panel is plain stupid. “Small Icons” is no substitute. When the display is primarily text, people read DOWN a list, not left to right. When ANYTHING changes in the control panel, you have to look in a different COLUMN than before for EVERY SINGLE THING. It is NOT user-friendly, it is anti-intuitive and, again, stupid is as stupid does.

Windows Explorer substitute – Anonymous is right on.

They changed stuff that doesn’t even make sense to change, like renaming “accessibility” as “ease of access”. WHO THE HELL looks for handicap feature under “Ease”.

I am so tired of “features” that are apparently designed to look good in a demo or make the Windows desktop more “Mac”. I spend an extra 15 minutes per setup tracking down and turning off useless gestures, transparency (provides useless blurred view of background), animations and similar fluff, while turning on hidden menus. Hello, Microsoft, menus are a GOOD thing for people who read!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:41:45 +0000

Still on a roll:

The task bar. Whoever designed that POS clearly never though that maybe people use programs that don’t have the world’s most unique icons. Every try installing 3 programs at once on 7 and they all have the same installer icon? Or better yet try having multiple documents open in the same program and then having to go through an extra click to select which is which. Preview? Yeah because I’m so retarded my life would end if I was forced to remember what programs were which or simply click on them to find out. Nope, I need a preview for sure.

Explorer…wow what were they thinking. I just want the left pane to be the folder tree. Nope, can’t have that. No you NEED libraries, places, favorites, and all their other junk. Want to turn the crap off you don’t use? Oopps windows search doesn’t have that…you have to delete registry keys. Without cleaning it up the folder tree ends up being an inch tall and being sandwiched between a mile of whitespace around the other crap.