What does your desktop look like?

[Lunch Money]

The theme was found at Devianart.com, where you can find other cool themes.

You install a .dll from neowin.net (no d/l link available atm, but you can find it quickly at either of those sites) that enables you to switch visual styles, and away you go. The background also comes from devianart. I just happened to have seen it purely by chance.

The calendar is an app called "rainlendar". Some of the Deviant themes have skins to go with it, but this one is just the default.

Cheers!
Greg

[Hunter]

Only the picture here, but this is on the dt

i cant wait for the snow to come

supposed to be a cold winter this year

[Sascha Franck]

Some of you folks seem to SAVE some files to your desktop...
Hm, you DO know that the desktop is part of partition C:, don't you?
NEVER save ANYTHING important on C:! Never! Not even with XP! No exceptions!
(And no, I'm not talking about shortcuts, I know they're meaningless.)

Btw, talking about shortcuts, I just delete them from my desktop because I never see it anyways. First thing I do whenever the thing is booted is pressing Windows+E (Explorer), so having any "nice" desktop theme doesn't mean anything to me. In addition, all the shortcuts to my most used apps are straight in the "root" popup of my start bar.

My desktop is looking like a complete mess because I allways save temporary text files and the likes on there, but I wouldn't even think about saving anything even remotely important there.

In case I need some visual enlightment I just load whatever pic in fullscreen mode (using Irfan View, btw, which IMO is a nice way to quickly resize and organize pics). Can't be arsed to permanently minimize everything just to stare at some desktop background (and yes, I know about Windows+M).

[aMUSEd]

The calendar is an app called "rainlendar".

Cool - this app is just what I've been looking for. It's lightweight and it integrates with Outlook so it shows all my appointments without me having to open Outlook (which takes forever).

Thanks for that

[Warmonger]

Some of you folks seem to SAVE some files to your desktop...
Hm, you DO know that the desktop is part of partition C:, don't you?
NEVER save ANYTHING important on C:! Never! Not even with XP! No exceptions!

Would you care to explain why not? And what is someone with only one hard drive (and partition) supposed to do?

[Mighty_Hero]

Nice Hunter, and I can't wait either.
Alway seem to have more ideas fall/winter

[Lunch Money]

Some of you folks seem to SAVE some files to your desktop...
Hm, you DO know that the desktop is part of partition C:, don't you?
NEVER save ANYTHING important on C:! Never! Not even with XP! No exceptions!

Would you care to explain why not? And what is someone with only one hard drive (and partition) supposed to do?

Sascha's just blowing hot air. A not uncommon thing for him to do, from what I've seen.

If you only have drive C: and no partitions, then the desktop's as good a place as any, I suppose! I personally don't like the clutter, but there's no real reason to not put anything there.

Sascha, not everyone has the same priorities, backup schemes, or performance-related fastidiousness; therefore, 'no exceptions' is a bit extreme!

Greg

[Sascha Franck]

Would you care to explain why not? And what is someone with only one hard drive (and partition) supposed to do?

A) There's still quite some reasons why you won't be able to access your C: drive (but even might have to reformat it). Virii and stuff like that being one of them (actually the most important one). Yes, you can use scanners, yes, you can use something else but IE and Outlook, still, using MS products (especially when accessing the web as well) bears some risks.
In case you got things saved on C: they'll be gone whenever some reformatting is required. OK, you could be a DOS- or recover-data-guru, but sometimes even that won't help.

B) For the very same reason it's pretty much clever to partition your drives (especially in case you only got one). Once you lose C: for whatever reason, all your data will still be there. Even some programs won't require reinstallement (WinZip for example), plus, they might keep some important settings (presets, default songs, etc.) in their program directory.

Sure, all that won't help you in case a hard drive is actually crashing - but then, almost nothing (apart from being anal about backups (like me) or using a RAID system) will help you in that case.

Which leads to:

C) Buy AS MUCH physical harddisks you can afford to buy!
They're freaking cheap these days and the benefits might pay of sooner than what you'd have thought...
Copy all your most important projects to a physically different drive and you'll be pretty much safe!

Anyways, IF you feel like you'd need to use some of the "Windows default places" to save your files to, use "My Documents" (which will show up in every standard XP "save" dialog as well) and place those on another drive (or partition) but C:. TweakUI will allow you to do so.

Alternatively, just don't do anything like this and send some "my HDD (or C: partition) will never crash (or be corrupt)" prayers out each minute you're at your PC. It will happen though. One day it WILL!
I allways thought it won't happen to me as well (using scanners, plus I'm cool, no n00b, a smart and clever dude etc etc). But it happened. And guess what: It happened inspite of all my prayers!

[Sascha Franck]

Sascha's just blowing hot air.

No, in this case I'm defenitely NOT!

If you only have drive C: and no partitions, then the desktop's as good a place as any, I suppose!

It defenitely is, sure. But then (see my other reply), there's more than enough reasons to have more than one partition.

Sascha, not everyone has the same priorities, backup schemes, or performance-related fastidiousness; therefore, 'no exceptions' is a bit extreme!

It *might* read a bit extreme, but in fact it isn't.
There's no reason for not having more than one partition (and even with a relatively stable OS such as XP there's still a good amount of reasons to have them).
And then, in case you're even halfway serious about your audio work, there are "no exeptions" indeed.
Once you lose the first "important" part of work (whatever that might mean, YMMV on this) you'll know why I'm saying so. Been there myself (horror, true horror, I tell you - and what I lost even wasn't anything "truly" important).

Apart from all the security reasons, having more than one partition makes your explorer workspace look way more tidy and organized.
Btw, my "standard" configuration for a single HDD system is allways made up of 4 partitions:
C: for Windows and a few programs that aren't clever enough to install anywhere else (fortunately those are getting less).
D: for any other programs. Those (especially audio programs) might save some default settings in their program directory that you might not want to lose, so it's allways good to keep them away from C:.
E: for samples. Usually the largest partition. While I backup all my song projects on CDs/DVDs/HDDs regularly (and don't need to access them all the time), I want to have my samples available all the time.
F: for data. I usually keep one folder (including some subfolders) there for docs, PDFs, whatever.
Another thing to place there might be "My Documents".
The rest is song folders.

On "serious" (again, YMMV on the "serious" part of it) machines I usually add at least one other physical drive to keep song data. Two (or three, or even four, whatever your standards are, whatever your mobo allows...) are even better, so you can do "temporary" backups (see last post).

[Warmonger]

I keep all of my important documents and whatnot somewhere on C:. But I'll also put them on a webserver, another computer, or on a CD or DVD. So why should I bother with multiple partitions? Believe me, I've spent a lot of time repartitioning hard drives, and I do know the benefits of separate data and app partitions, but the pros are outweighed by the cons for me.

Besides, I've never had a virus that destroys data that I consider important, and for that matter, I don't think one exists. And I've had hard drive failures before, but usually, if it doesn't fail in the first year, it'll probably last a few more years before failing.

Most importantly, I've learned through all of my hardware failures that I don't have any data that I consider all that vital anyway. It would suck to lose some WIP's, but I'll live without them if I have to.

[Sascha Franck]

and I do know the benefits of separate data and app partitions, but the pros are outweighed by the cons for me.

The cons being which?

[multree]

mine looks like this:

[Warmonger]

The cons being which?

Most importantly, segmentation of free space. I've got a small hard drive (60gb) and I'm constantly running out of free space. Dividing my hard drive into two chunks makes it even harder to install large programs or use large files, since all the free space will (usually) have to reside in the same folder on the same partition.

A smaller problem occurred when I reformatted a two-partition system. I had all my data on the second partition, and I installed the OS on the first without any problems, but my data drive then became the system partition, and the drive containing the OS was the D:. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but some programs seem to have issues when not installed to the C:. Then I managed to delete all of my mp3's by accidentally deleting a junction instead of removing it, but that's operator error, and another story altogether.

Considering that I have an adequate backup system in place (read-only DVD's and a second computer 80 miles away), I don't really see any advantage in using multiple partitions. Yeah, it's nice that some programs don't have to be reinstalled, but most of them do, so it doesn't end up saving me any time, especially since I have to recreate desktop icons manually. And besides all this, if I have a problem with my drive, it will be a mechanical failure which screws up multiple partitions.

In short, I've had problems with maintaining multiple partitions in the past, and so I'm going stick with a single partition as long as this is my only hard drive.

[Lunch Money]

I'll start a new thread for the HDD discussion:

Link to come in... oh... 30 seconds or so.

Discussion continued HERE

Mully-- nice looking Docking bar! I find the icons are pretty big in general for that app, but it's still rather cool. Nice view of the Betabugs folder you snuck in there, too.

Greg

[soulata]

Man comps are so powerful these days there's no real need to be anal about cpu and ram... I have no problems at the moment and I'm still in the ice ages (2100xp 256Meg ram).

Ice ages? I've an 2000xp and thought it's on the cutting edge

k