A close friend of mine asked me today about the way I setup Windows.  Long ago when I got my hands on a beta copy of Windows 95 the first thing I thought was "why is the taskbar/Start Menu at the bottom, it should be at the top".  I quickly moved it there and it's been there ever since.  To me this is a much more natural way to work since we read from the top left to the bottom right, not bottom left to top right.  This not only makes the start menu feel much more natural (like any other menu) but keeps all your menus very close by (keeping your app menus near the taskbar is much more efficent).

The real question that I was asked is how I setup Windows this way.  Well there are three main pieces, none of which are difficult.

Taskbar/Start Menu
First putting the tasbar/Start Menu at the top.  First you'll need to be sure it's not locked so right click on a blank spot on the taskbar and make sure that "Lock Taskbar" isn't checked (if it is uncheck it).  Then just click on a blank spot with your left button this time and drag it right up there.

ObjectDock
I've always been a huge fan of the dock that Apple introduced in OS X.  Love it.  Cool effects and a very efficient way to access all your most frequently used applications.  Fortunately Microsoft isn't the only one good at copying Apple as Stardock has done it too with ObjectDock. I just use the free version of ObjectDock as I don't need nor want any of the extra features.  Once installed there are a ton of options to play with, mainly position (obviously with my setup the bottom of the screen works best).  All you need to do is drag the icons from the start menu down to ObjectDock and order them as you like.  You'll notice I add separators to keep my apps grouped by type.

ShellEnhancer
The final important piece of software is ShellEnhancer by Nuonsoft.  There are a tons of cool features in ShellEnhancer but only one that I really care about and that's Alt-click and drag.  Anyone that's spent time in the Linux/X-Windows world knows how great this feature is.  You press and hold the Alt key on the keyboard and no matter where you click on a window you have grabbed it and can move it until you release the Alt key.  If you use multi-monitor this app is a godsend as it makes it so much easier to move windows around.  And it solves what can be one big problem with having your start menu at the top of the screen, sometimes applications can get their window border under the start menu making them very difficult to move around.  This is one of those apps that once you buy into it you really can't live with out it.  Whenever I use a friends PC for any length of time I install it right away, it's that important to me.

So there you have it, three of the little things I do to make Windows a little more usable.  Feel free to share any little extras like this that you use...