OneAndOneIs2

...I make my XP desktop work more and more like Linux :o)

Courtesy of a lot of FOSS being multi-platform, my XP desktop really doesn't look like Windows any more. It's got a 3D-accelerated dock courtesy of Stardock, and the wallpaper is a live view of Earth & the moon as seen from my current location, courtesy of Xplanet:

I just discovered another helpful little app that makes one of the minor annoyances go away: The crappy Windows scrolling.

In any decent OS, the scroll wheel scrolls whatever part of whatever window happens to be under the mouse pointer. Windows mostly doesn't do this: In Explorer, I was always annoyed by the fact that the sidebar won't scroll unless you click it first: Only whatever part of the window has focus can be scrolled. Better-designed apps, such as those from Mozilla, don't suffer from this, but even these can't correct the annoying Windows functionality that only allows the currently-active window to be scrolled.

So if you have a small window open, such as Pidgin, and want to scroll the full-screen app behind it, you can't. You can see it, you can mouseover it, but until you click it, it's useless.

That said, you can download a little app called KatMouse and all these problems go away. Whatever is under the mouse pointer gets scrolled, active or not.

It doesn't deal with the fundamental lack of security that Windows suffers from, or other Windows bugbears that *nix users will know about. But it takes out one more annoyance if you have to use Windows in day-to-day life.