I do this. I only use my desktop as a temporary holding place for files I'm working with. Nothing remains there past the end of the day. The only programs I have pinned to my taskbar are the ones that are usually open anyway. Highly recommended.

I made that post over four years ago, so I guess that's literally true. ;)

I'm knocking on wood, but this is looking more and more like what a proper 2014 desktop operating system should be. I'm actually pretty content with Windows 8 - I don't even mind the start screen - but just about every new feature announced for Windows 10 is something I'm really looking forward to.

Everyone's just been scared of that happening for years, especially since the Reader disaster. But Google's said from the beginning of Hangouts that the plan was to merge it with Voice. Better late than never.

There's a difference between those who are affected at a given time, and those who have or will be affected at some point in their lifetimes, which is naturally a larger number. You also don't need to have a disease to be "affected"; it can be hard on friends and family, as well. (To say nothing of the aggregate…

Thanks. :) My taskbar is actually not skinned, though. I centered the icons using the procedure here, and otherwise I just changed the Windows 8 border colors to black.

I didn't use any special program. I did the following two things:

Whoah. "Pickle Wars." I was not expecting that to come bursting out of the chest of my childhood this morning.

The simplest way would be to add NexusFont to your "Startups." Find NexusFont in your Start menu, right-click, and choose "Send To > Desktop (create shortcut)." Naturally, a shortcut will be created on your desktop. Click and drag it into your Start Menu, into the folder called "Startups." Now NexusFont will launch…

Touché. :)

It's that thing you're going to read about on Wikipedia in about 30 seconds.

At this point, I'd like to think it's more controversial - or more conspicuous, anyway - for a media property to carry on pretending that LGBT people don't exist. The mere appearance of an identifiable gay person on film is not "shoehorning," any more than casting Billy Dee Williams was about shoehorning racial…

The skin is called DarkRED Metro; you can get it here. :)

It's called DarkRED Metro. You can get it here. :)

I switched from Notepad++ to Sublime Text about two years ago and haven't looked back. Nothing touches this, at least on Windows. Multiple selections alone have become a feature I cannot live without. Keyboard shortcuts are plentiful, and even though it's not the lightest piece of software itself, I get work done…

In a pinch, you can use the style attribute to embed CSS styling directly into an HTML element. It's not pretty, and of course it defeats the broader purpose of CSS, but it works. Rather than <font color="#NNN" size="N">, I'd prefer to write <span style="color: #NNN; size: Npx">. In theory a CMS could still filter…

So this restores the taskbar's place as a permanent and global UI anchor. That makes a lot of sense, and if they wanted to better marry the desktop and Metro environments, it was probably necessary.

Every two weeks or so, I back up my laptop and server to a 1TB external drive. I use SyncBackFree, which performs an incremental backup based on file size and timestamp differences, so it's pretty painless. In between backups, I unplug the external drive and keep it in a protective case that should survive most…

I've uploaded my library to Google Music, as well. I like the security of having both local and cloud backups. Storage is cheap these days, and as far as I'm concerned, there's no reason to choose one when I can have both. :)

If I had more reliable Internet service, I'd probably be in the same position as you. I'd be fine archiving my music to an external drive somewhere if I could just use Google Music day to day.