(no subject)

My first "fuck off, what the fuck, go AWAY!" moment with Win7

So, so far I'm *very* happy with Win7. It's significantly faster than WinXP on the same hardware, I've had significantly fewer problems with drivers and hardware recognition than I'd *ever* had with XP or Vista.

My main complaint was the inability to get to a non-graphical login - I couldn't do the old CTRL-ALT-DELx2 trick to lose the "account selection" screen and type in the username I wanted, if I decided I wanted to be Administrator instead of myself. Worse, I couldn't get rid of the very pretty but entirely pointless graphical login itself. As far as I know, it's impossible - but at least I killed the "effects" and the background image.

I also had a seriously annoying internet-access problem for a while, but that wasn't Win7. That was my ISP, sucking ass, and the reason I hadn't seen it before, and wasn't seeing it currently on my lapdog or on The Lovely Wife's machine was that the problem is a *DNS* problem and all those other machines are preconfigured to *avoid the ISP's DNS*. So that was an easy fix, once I remembered to do it.

But I hit a VERY annoying problem.

In Firefox, and only Firefox, sometimes my keyboard layout would change. I'd be suddenly typing in *french*. It wasn't affecting anything else. Closing and reopening Firefox fixed it. And I immediately looked in the language and location settings, saw nothing about other languages, and was very confused. I figured it might be some weird-assed thing Firefox would fix in a day or two.

And then it happened in Pidgin, and I had an epiphany.
I looked in the *accessibility* settings, with regards to language, and, lo and behold, because I'm Canadian, Win7 helpfully installed French layout keyboards in case I might want them, and then helpfully bound CTRL-SHIFT to be the keyboard shortcut to swap keyboard input modes without needing to open the language tools.

CTRL-SHIFT.

Also known as *what you press when you want to select text using whole words at a time*. Standard, and has been for *decades*, across multiple platforms.

Holy FUCK that's the stupidest key binding choice since Facebook bound ALT-F4 to "swap directly to my Wall".

So, I told it DO NOT CHANGE MY LANGUAGE ON ME EVER, and, for good measure, I removed the French keyboard mappings it had so helpfully installed on me because as a Canadian I might want a a fucking e-accent-grave.

And that's my biggest complaint about Win7 so far. I am not only happy with this OS, I have had to make many fewer changes than I ever needed to in XP. What I want now is the ability to reduce the spacing between icons in the systray and on the desktop. I've reduced font size and swapped to small icons, but they're still wasting a ton of dead space between them. It's like using a Mac. Dammit, wasted screen real estate is *wasted*, let me put 'em closer together, fucker.

EDIT!: lafnjack points out how to fix the incompetent useless Mac-style crazy-large icon distance. And it works, perfectly, for your Desktop. Fix systray and win a prize! The prize is the hammer, for the record. But y'know.

I posted this from the desktop client in Win7. That is why it is awesome.