So I bit the bullet and downloaded IE7. Despite its many flaws, I liked Internet Explorer 6, but I was very worried about IE7. I gave Firefox and Opera another try, but I just don’t like them, particularly the fact that my wonderful discovery on making tooltips invisible didn’t work in Firefox. So this weekend I backed up my whole computer and downloaded IE7. The installation went fine, though I had to reinstall a couple of other programs, including Microsoft Money.

There are some things that are better: the tabbed interface, though I’m still not used to having to look at the top of the screen to see the open windows, rather than the bottom; when I go to Gmail, I no longer get a blank screen and have to refresh; and when I hover over a link, I always see the URL in my status bar (for some reason, certain links didn’t show in IE6), rather than having to right-click > view properties. On the other hand, IE7 is far less customizable than Microsoft claims. I hate the security alerts, but managed to disabled most of them. I also figured out how to do some of the customizing I needed – I’ll share more about all of that later.

For years now, I have been annoyed and exasperated by tooltips in Windows XP. They pop up unexpectedly, obscuring what I’m trying to read (in Internet Explorer, on my desktop, in the Control Panel) or type (in FrontPage – why must it tell me to use ctrl+click every time I hover over a link? After 7 years of web design, I know, believe me). Most of the time, tooltips are worthless. For years I have been trying to find a way to disable them, with little success. Tweak UI (a Windows configuration utility that I highly recommend) helps some, and there are various registry hacks that get rid of a few of more, but nothing that disables all of them. Today, I discovered a brilliant piece of software called AlphaXP. While it doesn’t disable tooltips, it does the next best thing: it makes them invisible.

AlphaXP actually has a whole bunch of features related to transparency, but the only one I care about is the one that lets you set the transparency of tooltips. Putting it at 100% makes them invisible. It’s not free, but the $15 price tag is well worth the disappearance of my number 1 Windows pet peeve. Note that the “lite” (free) version of the software doesn’t offer this feature, though I’m sure it’s a fine program for other transparency needs.

Are you as sick of spam as I am? It’s not just in email anymore… in addition to the hundreds of spam emails I receive at my 7 email addresses, this blog gets over 100 spam posts per day. Fortunately they are filtered out, but I still have to clean out the filter periodically. In any case, the best program I’ve found for dealing with email spam is Spamihilator, a freeware program with all kinds of options and a fairly decent learning filter. Check it out.

I’ve been looking for decent back up software forever. They always seem to want to compress all of my files into a single huge file that can only be used to restore the hard drive, or keep dozens of revisions, or other nonsense. All I want is a program that automatically, quietly, three times a day, updates a mirror of my documents and settings on my external hard drive, and I finally found it earlier this week: Backup4all. It has all of those “advanced” features that I don’t want, but it also does just what I do want. I highly recommend it. (And I didn’t find it a moment too soon – I had a computer scare on Wednesday. It turned out to just be a loose component in the CPU, but for a while there I thought the motherboard was shot.)