Although Microsoft has done a great job with the Windows shell over the years some people find it to be rather lackluster and long for something to take away from monotony that is the Windows shell.
Thankfully there are a few options that do not require modifying any of the core Windows files that can give you access to a wider world using “BlackBox” or “Emerge Desktop”.
Screen shot of Emerge Desktop
Emerge Desktop
Emerge Desktop is a replacement windows “shell” (the desktop environment normally provided by Windows Explorer) for Windows 2000 and above. In order to replace Windows Explorer as a shell, it provides a system tray (the area that collects the icons collected at the lower right corner in Explorer), called emergeTray. It will also provide access to the users programs (normally accessed with the windows “start” button) via a right-click on the desktop, via emergeCore.
<<Download Emerge Desktop>>
Screen shot of BlackBox
BlackBox
So, what is Blackbox? Blackbox is the fast, lightweight window manager for the X Window System you have been looking for, without all those annoying library dependencies. Blackbox is built with C++ and contains completely original code (even though the graphics implementation is similar to that of WindowMaker).
Blackbox is still maintained for Linux but is seems like development has slowed down on the Windows port.
<<Download Blackbox>>
There are many more window managers out there but these are only the few open source ones that I took the time to play with a little bit. Both of Blackbox and Emerge Desktop allow for customizations to be done to your desktop and the entire shell and are fully customizable.
Over the summer I did a load of new deploy systems and grew tired of backing things up by hand. So what would any nerd do? Well this nerd created a few batch files that will backup files to a flash drive for transportation to a new computer with minimal efforts.
[WARNING]
This file deletes certain shortcuts and all media from a users “My Documents” folder since it was used on a corporate network, this is not a bug, it is a feature.
The code is as follows;
setlocal
::loop through user accounts
::declare variable below
set ProfileFolder=%ALLUSERSPROFILE:\All Users=%
::for F times do this action until there are no more user accounts
for /f "delims=" %%a in ('dir "%ProfileFolder%\." /b') do (
::assign the folder address
echo "%ProfileFolder%\%%a"
::assign the computer name
echo "%computername%"
::Delete old shortcuts that will not be on the new computers
del "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\Desktop\Micro*.*" /F /Q
del "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\Desktop\TABS*" /F /Q
del "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\Desktop\All-*" /F /Q
::Delete all music files that shouldn't be on computers to begin with
del "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\Desktop\*.mp*" /F /S /Q
del "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\Desktop\*.w*" /F /S /Q
del "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\My Documents\My Music\*.*" /F /S /Q
del "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\My Documents\*.mp*" /F /S /Q
del "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\My Documents\*.w*" /F /S /Q
::Backup appropriate folders & Files into the Backup folder
xcopy "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\Desktop\*.*" "..\%computername%\%Folder%\%%a\Desktop\" /e /f /c /h /k
xcopy "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\Favorites\*.*" "..\%computername%\%Folder%\%%a\Favorites\" /e /f /c /h /k
xcopy "%ProfileFolder%\%%a\My Documents\*.*" "..\%computername%\%Folder%\%%a\My Documents\" /e /f /c /h /k
)
::finally copy all the shared docs to the external media
xcopy "C:\Shared Docs\*.*" "..\%computername%\Shared Docs\" /e /f /c /h /k
All you have to do is copy the above into a text file and name it with a .bat extension or you can download the version here.
grab_user_files.bat download
Recent Comments