Hydro mentioned that he had about 20 windows open. I initially thought it was preposterous, then I took a good look at how my own workspace appeared.



Evidently I'm not that far better off. (I constantly alt-tab to Firefox/mIRC and a couple of other things, so it's actually even more active windows). I had no idea that my desktop was this crammed full of windows until today, since I kind of knew it was like that but never paid much mind to it; it was then that I realized I barely ever see my wallpaper or actual desktop anymore. Heck, I even have an explorer window of "desktop" open, but I never look at the actual desktop anymore.

How well do you guys fare in this field of organizing your desktop? Am I the only one who keeps a ton of crap open?

I usually just have Chrome with Pandora on and Visual Studio opened.

Also, .ass file?

20? lol

When I am working on a project (which I haven't for a long time) I easily have 100+ windows open. Before FF reached critical lard mass and began crashing a lot I had 5 windows with 50-100 tabs a piece. Tutorials, assets, music hunting, torrent searching, etc. all ended up occupying a rather large number of tabs. But FF is inelegant for any kind of multitasking like this.

So, a rundown of the major stuff I'd have going for something like Salvation;

At least 2 instances of 3ds max (one for current edits, one for checking other files), and one instance of XSI just to convert the files
Some command prompts in various directories for converting the files out of XSI to the game's format
30-50 folders (music directories, sfx directories, model directories, a directory for every folder inside the mod's folder for quick access, plus related directories in the decrypted source files, the base directories of my hard drives. I often end up with duplicate folders open I then remove after a while.)
Video encoding stuff (around 4 apps, I am usually encoding unrelated stuff when working)
Process explorer (to keep an eye out for anything odd going on)
Audition 1.5, probably two instances of it (sfx editing)
sony vegas, though this uses a lot of ram
8-10 instances of notepad for entity files and one instance of notepad++ for editing meshes
Jdownloader
Vent
MPC/winamp
Maybe 7zip in an important archive
Many Firefox instances encumbered with lard (flash is the worst offender and easily bsods me)
Steam (mostly to stalk people)
Trillian (no need for irc, don't talk to any more than 3-4 people)

Probably forgot a bunch but that would be my average.

Since I'm not working on anything besides recovering some files from that HD failure I don't really have anything open.



I sincerely wish windows had multiple desktops so I could segregate my work by type. Entity edits, mesh edits and related, video stuff, etc. But it can't. I fare fine without it, but this is why I wanted two monitors. The only problems I have is with stuff like the entity directories for the mod and then the source files that have the same names, and I get confused which is which in my taskbar.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 31 2012, 10:44 am by IskatuMesk.

It generally depends on what I am working on.
I think I have the most windows open when I am working on something music based, but, even then, there is at most three or four programs opened at a time (Anvil Studio, Audacity, TuxGuitar and/or Power Tab).

However, the top of my desk becomes the biggest mess of all with: crumpled papers, empty bottles, etc.

By the way, Slayers: good choice.

Actually, yeah, I have exactly this on my laptop. Sometimes I won't have Pandora open when I'm trying to figure out something complicated, though.

On my desktop, it's usually Firefox + Messenger and maybe up to a couple Windows Explorer windows. Once I finish EUDGen or move the source onto my desktop, I imagine I'll have VS open more often on there as well (because it already has my next project on it).

People with desktops and habits like Mesk's seem disorganized to me, like they're not quite doing something right. On that note:
Firefox isn't made to be lightweight. Use something else. Maybe look at this one, which uses the same engine as Firefox.

More than 4 icons in the system tray is excessive for me.
My desktop currently has 20 icons and I actually consider that to be in need of cleaning.

EDIT: Back down to 12 icons on my desktop. Thanks, SEN.

Organization is not my forte. I need things accessible quickly and without delay, so it's best just to leave them running. I have the hardware for it, so there's no drawback.

I literally have no idea what ANY of that stuff is (except for Skype).

I currently have 36 icons on my desktop, but 17 of them are games that I've downloaded that I haven't played in weeks (some even months). I usually have about 4-5 windows open (a few firefoxes [I hate tabs], iTunes, maybe LoL/vent/BW/something). My laptop is much cleaner, having only 15 icons on the desktop, but the odd number makes hard to organize. I need my icons in be in rows of 2, and having one sitting there by itself with no icon next to it is ugly.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 31 2012, 4:45 pm by I Iz LEET.

Lol he has weeaboo applications launched all over



Here's mine on any given workday. Currently making a game trying to make some money (short on money) before school starts. I have Visual Studio open all the time, usually about 5-10 chrome tabs, currently have 5. I have 3-5 folders open at any time for accessing different source or asset files. Spotify for music, and sometimes another chrome tab instead of spotify. I have a plethora of sticky notes to remember everything, a lot of notes pertaining to the current game I'm making. Oh an skype.

Advanced SubStation Alpha Subtitle File, used by VSFilter to render subtitles with effects. It can either be .ssa or .ass and is the default format used by Aegisub.

What about Pale Moon? Granted I've stopped having any slowdowns with Firefox ever since I purged my legacy version profiles, but I've heard that Pale Moon is a good alternative for anyone who needs a better performing vanilla FF.

Lots of people here have Visual Studio open it seems; I have it running in a VM since I don't use it often but still need quick access to it (One other reason is because I have to deal with projects from the VS6/VS2008 era and don't want to fuck with dependencies in VS2010, so I made a couple of virtual machines and installed different versions of Visual Studio in them).

Foobar isn't weeaboo

And damn Cecil, that's a lot of notes. I never see my desktop nowadays so my widgets/note applications I have installed are rendered useless, sadly. I actually keep my notes in Notepad++ tabs now.

Hrrm. ~10 Windows open right now. Two PDFs, powerpoint, matlab, steam, Chrome with 12 tabs, Zune, Matlab, two Windows Explorer windows. I don't really use the desktop at all anymore to navigate. The only useful icon there is the recycle bin (can't be searched for without an edit I'm too lazy too make), the rest is because I don't care enough to clean it out. I have eight icons pinned to the taskbar (word, notepad, excel, zune, pidgin, skype, chrome, windows explorer), with a Zune toolbar currently visible. I usually fullscreen whatever I'm doing, sometimes settling for half-screen if I need to use two programs at once. On the Ubuntu workstation I'm currently sitting at (but typing on my laptop), I have three terminal windows all in small boxes, with chrome, various Cadence windows peeking out.... Ubuntu does not make elegant workstations natural. So ugly.

Always at least two tabs of regular Chrome and one of Incognito (OGame and BattleSpace, BS with two accounts), TeamSpeak, whatever I'm working on, iTunes, and helper media if necessary. TBH not all that much. Computer could easily handle much more.

Crissake ya'll need some organization skills

Let's see, I have three documents open, MS Project, and six tabs open in FireFox.

My physical workspace though...that's a different story.

I've never had a problem with a 2008 and 2010 install on the same machine (and I believe they're supposed to be able to not conflict with each other), if that would save you a VM.

You really need a dual-monitor setup set up.

I gave up on trying to keep my things organized with Windows 7. Always rearranges my desktop to go from neatly arranged icons to a clusterfuck of I have no idea where anything went. Though I used to be very organized and keep everything inside one folder that had 8 subfolders which all had like 5 more subfolders each and it even went deeper than that.

Workwise, my laptop likes to freeze up randomly and screw me over on whatever I'm doing. I usually have MSN, Firefox, an explorer folder(generally music), and nowawadays I have Hamachi open to chat with a couple friends.

Aurora can't even load Wikipedia or Twitter without blowing up and freezing my computer to the point it affects other programs (Media Player will stop playing music for a good 20 minutes before I get control of the computer back.)

I have no viruses, surprisingly. Maybe I just dropped my laptop too many times.

According to what?

Also, try this fix if you haven't already.

I use Norton AntiVirus, Malwarebytes, run CCleaner every so often, and occasionally check with RKill if it gets too bad.

That's probably what's causing your computer to slow down or freeze. My parents had Norton on their laptop and it would take forever to do anything. It took maybe 45 seconds to open Windows Explorer windows or Google Chrome without anything else open. Once I removed Norton, everything sped up; it was like a whole new machine.

It's worth a shot.

I would do this but all I have is Norton for any quality protection besides Malwarebytes, not that Norton is all that great in the first place. Do you use anything in alternative to Norton that I could replace it with whenever my subscription runs out?

Microsoft Security Essentials. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials