How to make Windows 7 look like XP

Yes I'm an old hand from back in the 286 days too (in fact even before).  MS are a business and do have to keep offering something new, so they can eat lunch this week.  And to give them credit, some of it is a genuine step forward.  Does anyone really miss DOS 3.0 ?  But of course a lot of it is a questionable foray into a new look, just to be new, and what really earns them enemies is when they axe murder perfectly good functionality of their previous products for no discernable intelligent reason.

Now, the "multiple locations" of documents in Win 7 (and XP too actually) as I understand it isn't really actual copies all over the place.  Rather, they have created "virtual directories" -- a rather convoluted system of real folders masquerading as other somewhat fictitious ones.  This is all done in the name of having "multiple personalities" on one's computer.

Frankly, it's usually just a big fat pain in the butt.  For home and small business systems, computers are so cheap these days that everybody has their own personal one (maybe several) anyway.  They are de facto mostly "single user" devices.   Then again, in larger networked systems (which includes even some very modest sized offices, schools, etc), a complete server system with Unix style file access control is invariably present.

One can forgive Microsoft for wanting in on those multi-user commercial systems.  And I see how employees of a company might have personal laptops that they use for work, so there has to be a well structured file permissions and security system that even personal single user computers need to be compatible with.  The good news is that most of that can be worked around when it comes to personal single use computers.   I obtained a 3rd party file manager "XYplorer" for all my routine hard disk access.   I set up my own system of folders and program launch windows all accessed via my desktop.  This all ends up in a path under c:\documents and settings.. just like MS's default user files structure, but it is more easily configured to do what I want and not what MS thinks I should have.

Windows 7 still has much of that functionality, except for the huge annoyances of its window handling.  As I say, any files that look like they are in two places aren't really duplicated.  There are just multiple levels and paths of access.  And disk space is hardly a consideration anyway these days.

As for 64 bit, watch out.   Supposedly it is finally making some tried and true old favorite apps fully obsolete, ie. as in refusing to run them.  Seems to me that when systems get "newer" and "more powerful" they should still run the old stuff, and even more easily than they used to.

As for Windows 8, watch the computer scenes in a movie like "Skyfall".  I think that's the kind of dazzling multi-dimensional experience MS are aiming for.  Trouble is, all I wanted to do was keep my parts list over on the left hand side of my W7 laptop's LCD while the schematic I was drawing stays over on my big outboard monitor.   And when I click on a directory of detail drawings in another window to see which ones I need to reference in my schematic, I don't need that damn folder opening on top of the other ones I'm already using, thank you very much.   Go ahead and sell the cool new virtual universe to all the kiddies.  But leave me my multi-tasking that you got to a pretty good state in XP.  Anyone listening Microsoft?  (I won't hold my breath...)

Shawn .....  Your answer is TOTALLY BOGUS! .....

     Follow this guys "clicks", and you find NO "Windows Classic" option!

     Making Windows 7 "look like XP" cannot be done without trusting some kiddie geeks fifth party software on your machine.

     Not ME!

Dav Sand ...........................

     WHAT ..... in the world are you talking about ???????