My Annoyances

Okay, I know it's a little late to grip about this now... but I hate, and I mean absolutely hate, the whole "My Computer", "My Network" and "My Documents" thing with Windows. It's so condescending... I'm not a child, I'm very capable of organizing my files into the directory structure that I want.

So one of the first things I do is remove this functionality from Windows:

1. Go to the Start menu
2. Select Run
3. Enter regsvr32 /u mydocs.dll
4. Click OK

Now if you delete them, they won't come back! There's also another annoying one, if you install Adobe Acrobat, the application creates a "My eBooks" folder which the above trick won't fix. I wasted a good deal of time looking for a preference in Acrobat to disable this. Guess what? It doesn't exist.

Instead, to stop this "feature" you need to go to the Acrobat directory and delete a plug-in:

1. Go to your Acrobat Directory (usually C:\Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat x.x)
2. Go to the Plug-ins directory (Acrobat\plug_ins)
3. Delete or re-name the ebook.api file

That should do the trick. Microsoft, Adobe, and other vendors should be ashamed for treating their customers like idiots. You can also visit TweakXP.com for some more great hints on dealing with XP annoyances.

Posted at April 20, 2004 09:07 AM