After the Vista disaster, the people who invented the ribbon interface in Office were promoted to control all of Windows. They carried across the same interface philosophy. Since I hate that ribbon, and since one of their brilliant ideas is to remove all classic menu reversion options, I stuck with XP.
Luckily for me a lot of people felt the same way, and someone did something about it. Over at sourceforge, there's a thing called the Classic Shell. This wonderful app replaces the hideous Windows 7 mega-blocky-dropdown-mess with a clean, pure, classic Windows menu.
It works brilliantly. You get the Windows 7 technical advances plus the cleanest Windows interface ever.
The next app is a better file search. In these googly days you'd think it wouldn't be possible -- or survivable -- to write a bad quality search system, but Microsoft managed it. Again. The file search in Win 7 soaks up unbelievable amounts of CPU in return for a file search that's worse then XP's. The answer is to turn it off completely and instead install the Everything search engine. It runs like the wind and uses almost no resources. The search syntax is a bit odd for anyone used to regular expressions, but once you've got it, it's very intuitive.
