New
#201
I read all of this thread out of curiosity. The only cosmetic changes I ever make to any Windows OS is to the Desktop, changing the background to black with a centred (centered for you in the US) Borg ship, and cancelling the screensaver. But I did fancy changing the boot logo to the Half-Life 3 or Doom 3 biohazard logos, just for fun. Looks a bit fiddly so far, though. Anyway, I would like to make a few off topic comments about some of the content.
I can understand the first poster's annoyance with the answerer, though his response might have been a little less harsh. Some time ago many forum sites rewarded answerers with points which moved them up in the site's heirarchy, gaining them higher ranks and accompanying fancy titles. I regularly had to wade through responses that were useless, timewasting, and clearly indicated that the poster had not read my post at all, and was simply answering to gain those points. It was very annoying.
I'm surprised by the number of posters who seem to disdain this pursuit of tweaking. I approve wholeheartedly, whether for serious or trivial reasons (fun or "because we can"). If you don't want to do it, go watch Scrooge again and join in his frivolity. Hats off to all of you trying hard to make this work. I'm sure you will succeed eventually.
As for security. After first installing Windows 7, I left it alone and booted primarily into XP (I dual Boot), exclusively due to the constant snotty messages that told me I couldn't do this or that because I did not have sufficient privileges whatever - on a machine that I OWN for god's sake. Gaining those privileges proved far too complicated. Drove me crazy. 6 months later I discovered the Hidden Administrator in 7, and have never looked back. The very first thing I do following a fresh install is to invoke the Hidden Administrator and delete the User Account I just installed under. I once mentioned this in a thread somewhere, and got several replies issuing dire warnings and doom-laden scenarios. Nonsense. I had full control in DRDOS, MSDOS, WIN95, 98, 98SE, and XP, and nothing ever went wrong. I've been using 7 in this way for two years without a single security problem. And if it does screw my system up? I just reinstall is all. No big deal. I save all my files to a separate hard drive and have an image of a clean, basic install on a DVD ready to reinstate.
Just saying.
And it's "pooter", not "puter".