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[AIO] How to Get All Good Old Classic Features Back in Windows 7

Comments

• PSantos

  Good tutorial. Win 7 has a lot of stupid things that are a big step back, it's good to have some workarounds to fix them. It's not about going back to XP, it's about making Win7 better.

  Network and sharing center is ridiculously complicated now. Try disconnecting and connecting from the network from there and see what happens. Network activity is obviously useful when you're having network problems.

  Control Panel icons organization makes no sense at all. Because of schizophrenic display or columns that you're supposed to read in rows, each time you go back to the control panel and your window size is different, the number of columns changes and you end up looking everywhere for the damn Program and Features icon.

  Taskbar grouping only makes you click more times not only to activate a program, but just to see which are open! On top of that, you have no control whatsoever on the order of the tabs in the taskbar. I use 7 Taskbar Tweaker that lets me drag and define the order that I want. I don't work by Words and Excels and Internet Explorers. I work by tasks that each require a set of applications, so I keep the applications of each task next to each other and in logical order.

  Windows Search is a disaster. It used to be simple to search a file by date, which is a great way to find a file you recently lost. Now you have to study the manual to figure out how to do it. Searches from the start menu most often only gave me absurd results. Got rid of it completly and installed Agent Ransack. Search by dates and file contents without having to work on the "Unix prompt".

  Which window is active? Never been so hard to tell and can't be changed... But it's pretty all right, that's what matters these days.

• Gabe Lawrence

  I have to admit, I like the new Paint much better than the old. It has all the same features of the old but most importantly, the canvas handles (those little dots you drag to reshape the canvas) are bigger but even more importantly than that....MORE THAN 3 UNDO'S...I really need those! ;-)

• r m

  Thank you VG. I am one of many desktop, database and network support personnel in an enterprise establishment. We are transitioning from Windows XP to Windows 7. Last year we transitioned from Office XP to Office 2007. Depending on what adminstrators have locked down by group policy in Active Directory, maintaining the "Classic Look" is the easiest way to keep continuity in the office by maintaining a workflow instead of a work stoppage. Due to company and IT budgets being cut to bare minimums, training personnel is no longer an option. Training has become self service. I can put out some links to Microsoft training sites but our internet is locked down from Youtube or any site that is going to take up bandwidth. Again good article, I saved as IE favorite when it comes time for Windows 7 to be deployed to our department.

• VG

  ^^ Glad to help you. :)

• John S

  Thanks for the great help VG. All those people who make emotional comments are typically missing the point. Microsoft has long held the arrogant view that the end user "will get what we think you need and it will be programmed with minimal human logic" rather than supplying a product that the consumer actually wants. This is the usual result of holding something close to a monopoly.
  It makes no difference what anybody else thinks - your computer is your computer and it should be possible, after all these years of tech development, to easily customize it how you like it. For the conspiracy theorists out there - it's probably just a plot to keep us all busy learning new ways to achieve the same end result rather than letting us become proficient and thereby more productive. If you really want something to complain about go back to the days when the keyboard was deliberately scattered (to QWERTY etc) because typists became too fast and jammed the mechanical keyboards of the day. In typical short-sighted human style the engineers of the day chose to slow down the typists by confusing the arrangement of the keys. They should have worked harder on better technology - instead we now have the legacy of the stupid QWERTY - it has nothing to do with the most commonly used letters being in a convenient posdition. An opportunity for change was lost at the dawn of the mass computer market. If only IBM had had the courage to make an alphabetical order keyboard! Sorry for the ramble - but some of us just need to step back and look at the real problems. I await a barrage of emotional denial of my statements - go for it bloggers!
  Thanks again VG - great help!