Exposé on your Peecee, sort of

Like many of you, I live on both sides of the fence. I’ve had Apples through the ][+ and SEs and PCs since the original 8086 and XT.

Currently I have a Peecee, specifically a Compaq laptop. However I <3 the Apple GUI.

So I wanted to share one teeny Apple-like tweak that gives me pleasure on my Peecee, a Dashboard jury-rig. If you have a Compaq, you may very well have those “One Touch” buttons along the top. I have one of these buttons set on something like Exposé. XP has a “show desktop” function, and that’s what I’ve set it to; it’s not exactly the same, but the essential gestalt gut feel of it is the same: If I’m sick of overlapping windows, I just reach for a physical button, without thinking, and they are gone. I push it again, and the windows are back.

To set it, do the following:

1) Go to Start->Control Panels->Keyboard, then select the One-Touch tab.
2) Select one of the five buttons (I prefer the far right), and in a cheeky move, name the “Label” field: Exposé.
3) Select the radio button “Open a document, application, or folder on your computer”
4) In the field enter:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Desktop\Show Desktop.scf
and of course substitute USERNAME with your Windows XP username. Then click OK and that’s it.

It doesn’t have all the options of Dashboard, but it’s good enough since seeing the desktop is the option I use most often in OS X anyways.

Oh btw if this doesn’t work for you, you may need to update your keyboard One-Touch driver, find your computer model at HP/Compaq’s driver site.

One of these days I have to set Yahoo Widgets to go up on the adjacent One-Touch button. For some reason I remember I tried it once, and couldn’t figure it out. Any pointers?

Also you could bind this to any function that supports the opening of an application, so you’re not limited to One-Touch buttons on a Compaq.

This entry was posted on July 1, 2007 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Hardware, OS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.