Well exams are over, during which period my computer was slowly dying on me. I had had the one installation of windows XP ever since I bought the computer a little over 5 years ago. Over that time I have used it almost every day, shut it down almost every night, filled it with a ridiculous amount of crap, caused it to fall ill (and helped it to recover from) two serious viruses, accumulated around 550 programs and customised the hell out of everything. Eventually it took twenty minutes to start up, which in recent weeks became a longer period of time than the average time it would run for before crashing.
Long story short, it was time to upgrade. But me being me, I couldn't just buy a new computer. Far to clever (read poor, stingy, stubborn etc.) for that. Instead I simply spent $100 on a new 1TB hard drive, which took me a whole day to install, mainly because my motherboard has 3 bays for 3.5inch drives, but only two of them have rails (which are required to lock the drives in place - and I already have 2 drives). So I found a great little computer store which sold me a metal encasing to covnert one of my 5.25inch bays into a 3.5inch bay, but finding this store, driving there, and installing the drive + bay took a while. Plus after I was done it took me three boots + opening of the case to figure out I hadn't connected the power to the drive. Silly me.
Anyway I decided to install windows 7 on this drive, and it took me a further day and a half to get it, essentially, to behave like my old XP. By that I mean, I wanted it to feel comfortable again, like I hadn't lost five years worth of computing habits. This involved re-installing the most crucial programs out of the 550, and ensuring many others which I'm still running from the old drive were operable (to avoid turning the new drive into the same disaster in one/fifth the time). Most importantly though, it also involved the physical appearance and behaviour of the OS.
I used to have an entirely lucky star theme when I was running XP, found somewhere on the internets, made by some kind anon (or perhaps a non-anon). Anyway my favourite part of it was the chocolate cornet start button, so I replaced this first of all - which involved actually creating a start orb - a fun and educational process requiring an understanding of alpha channels. I also managed to find the same cursor set that the LS theme used, which was not a lucky star set (although they do exist), but a sleek-yet-soft bank called 'comic blue' (which is quite popular among deviantards). I find actual character based sets, while ridiculously kawaii, kind of impractical :p. Windows 7 does its own paper cycling now, so I didn't have to install an app for that, but I switched from my LS wallpaper folder to my K-On! folder. In turn, chrome, which used to have a K-On! theme, now has an awesome nichijou theme that the guy at randomnessthing.com made. I also installed a few customization things from Stardock including 'fences' which allows you to organise your desktop icons, 'desktopX' which can create and apply whole themes (I couldn't find a decent one and I cbf making one myself, so I just set some colours and dealt with aero - aero is ok because its kind of inoffensive and doesn't reek of that institutionalised microsoft feeling, which was the original reason I started customising because it started to make me needlessly morose), 'objectdock' which adds a cool apple-like quick access menu to the bottom of your pc (it chugs through cpu resources but only while mousing over it - I don't think its optimized to make use of your graphics software in quite the same way that windows GUI elements are, but hey, I'm guessing microsoft have a few more resources at their disposal than startdock, and plus 'objectdock' is completely free) and 'cursorFX' which I used to change the cursors.
EDIT:
The last thing I changed was the sounds. Previously I had the Japanese windows 7 sound pack featuring Nanami Madobe, and Lucky Star bgm for shurtdown/startup/long on/off, but I thought it might be time for something different. Startup and Shutdown feature The introduction to Silky Heart and Vanilla Salt, respectively, while the log on/off themes are the introduction and ending to nano desu, respectively. The 'error/alert' tones like asterisk etc. are all taken from the little 'uguu~' soundbites on the Kanon visual memories CD. To break with the Hocchan trend, the min/max/restore up/down sounds are all taken from voice demos from the acting in the magnificent OVA Tamayura (soon to be a series, ogod please air when I have no work to do). Finally, device connect and device disconnect are taken from the very first and very last few seconds of an album by Hazel Nuts Chocolate. They are totally out of context, but ridiculously ridiculous.
Now that all is said and done, the results are shown below:
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| the desktop. All the backgrounds are this good, ie. /w/, watashi wa anata o aishite, ie. weeabo as way of saying I <3 u in as formal and stilted language as possible because its directly from google translate since you know the words but not the grammars but then you romanise it, effective trampling all over the formality, because you can't handle runes. |
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| chromes, my favourite program. Also, nippaaaaaaaah! |
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| XP, doin it the old way |
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| Moe. Not Even Once. This....may have been...at....well not at home.... :p That's where they say people are using these days anyway @_O. EDIT: new and improved censored image for less v& & b& |
Listening to: Converge - Lonewolves (No Heroes)
EDIT: Listening to: Converge - Hell to Pay (Jane Doe), and my new sound theme :D
