New to Windows 7/Vista - transitional advice?

Seconded. Indispensable (and free) little utility that belongs in every Windows build.

Yeah, thanks for recommending Teracopy! I love utilities that fit into my life seamlessly. Now it’s in there, doing it’s thing automatically. Awesome!

Trust me, you do not want to shit up your C: directory. By default subdirectories under it can be created just fine, but not files directly in C:.

Why not? I mean, I understand it from a prettiness point of view, but are there actual ramifications?

  1. It’s a common place for viruses to hide in plain sight.
  2. The more you put in there, the more likely you are to dick around in there and accidentally delete a critical subdirectory.
  1. Like others, I prefer to leave UAC on. It’s way less obtrusive than it is in Vista and it’s just enough of a speed bump to let me know if something’s trying to install or make a change I don’t want it to, but not enough to nag you to death.

  2. The days of needing to strip Windows down to the metal for optimal performance are long gone, IMHO. I leave Windows Firewall on and use MSE for anti-everything else. You can configure the latter so it doesn’t auto-scan certain directories (e.g., your games) for a performance boost when accessing them.

Don’t know if it still holds true under new file systems like NTFS, but it used to be that there was a hard cap of objects (files, folders) that could exist in the root directory. 1024 I think, but I’m not absolutely sure of the number.

Oh, and I might as well put it in this thread, the Win 7 3-packs are back on sale. I just ordered one from Amazon for $140 including shipping.

A few notes on things in this thread:
a) Teracopy caused serious slowdowns in the copying of directory entries for me. I was messing around with a tree of about 20k directories and many more 4k files and when Teracopy was enabled it took me three or four times longer. This was back with Vista though, maybe it’s been improved since.
b) Seconding the suggestions to tweak as little as possible. Windows is pretty good out of the box. If you are not on an SSD I’d suggest disabling search if you don’t use it – doing that made my hard drive a lot quieter during idle periods which is a win in and of itself.

I won’t argue it can benefit someone, but I’ve never had an issue on my own PC where anything went haywire, since about the introduction of Win 2000. I just don’t want it consuming resources.