How Many Windows? 327
youthoftoday asks: "As part of a recent piece of coursework (I'm a student) I talked to a number of people about how many windows they typically have open at any one time. I received a startling range of responses, and that got me thinking about what people consider a 'normal' working environment in terms of the number of windows they have open and what they like to get done. I usually have about 25 windows open and about 15 tabs in my browser (over two monitors) as a standard working environment in Mac OS X. I usually keep a set of windows in position for about 5 days between restarts. Others prefer to close windows for applications they're not using right at this minute. And we all know people who are scared to have more than one window open. So, how do Slashdot readers use their OSes?"
Depends on the computer / other things (Score:3, Funny)
At home when I am doing misc stuff I'll generally have 20+ with some browser tabs and IE windows (FF and IE)
If I'm searching for porn..usually 50+
Since this is for school you can tell them computer parts or something instead of porn I guess..
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Most machines at work can't handle more than four at a time. Part of that limitation is all the corporate spyware they install on every machine. I think someone in IT even said 256MB of RAM is plenty to run WinXP. It is, until you try to run other things.
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WOW, GHz? (Score:2)
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Not many... (Score:2)
Less than I thought (Score:2)
Totally, completely depends. (Score:2)
- Window for previewing/testing the website
- Window for editing the source files (I use HAPedit a lot for editing)
- Window for showing the source files on my HDD
- Window for FTP to server to upload files from my HDD
- Window for surfing the internet to do research/learn about PHP etc (this is consistent)
- Window for music (I suppose winamp counts as a window)
- Window for graphics design
To be honest, I can't begin to understand how you wou
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Desktop #2: web browsing
Desktop #3: coding
Desktop #4: running the program I'm coding
Desktop #5: email
Desktop #8: alternate coding environment for a different project
Desktop #9: alternate program running environment
Desktop #11: syslog output and whatnot for a machine in a different state that I'm responsible for
Desktop #12: xmms and interface with my web radio
Why can't these be on one desktop? Why is it better that they're on 9 separate ones? Seems to unnecessarily complicate matte
windows? how about desktops? (Score:2)
For me, the answer is 5, organised as follows:
1: Playground, this has browser, music player, the odd game and so on it.
2: Mail. Yes, an entire desktop dedicated just to the mail client, I don't know why, but I got used to it.
3. Documents. This is where Lyx, Kile, Jabref, OpenOffice, Acroread and so on will o
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desktops? how about windows (Score:2)
0: stuff: Just a standard shell, yeah.
1: emacs: Text editing. Usually about eight buffers open, depending on what I'm doing.
2: irc: I'm always using irssi, productivity drainer of our time.
3: songs: ncmpc gives me music.
Other than that, there are usually two or three other windows open, again depending on what I'm doing. Usually, they are terminals. I also have both a web browser and Gaim open, neither of which translate very well to a t
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What? Can you explain why you think that only Linux has virtual desktops?
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"(but of course that only applies to Linux)"
You control: Desktops [yousoftware.com] for Mac OS X. I use this at work and it's a really nifty program. It does chap my ass that I have to pay for something a decent OS should supply, but it's basically necessary software for me these days, even with dual monitors.
I have six desktops, and use four at home with my Linux box (IceWM). I need fewer at home because I do fewer context switches here.
At work, I have a desktop reserved for mail, too. The left monitor holds th
Slashdot Poll (Score:2)
Otherwise, 1-5 apps, 2-10 browser windows, with 1-5 tabs in each browser window. My habits.
Some people I know had 50+ windows (IE 5 or 6?), but that was before tabbed browsing. Yes, and we never turned off those computer when leaving work. In fact it was considered bad for the pc:s (Wndows NT 4.0) to turn them on and off. If you had had to them off the broweser habit of that guy probably would have been different.
Minimum: 10, average: ~20 (Score:2)
I always have at least 10 separate windows open (many more if you consider each open session within screen distinct), but I usually average closer to 15 or 20. Konqueror is one of my omnipresent applications and I frequently queue things up in new tabs that I mean to get to eventually (often I'll have tabs open for weeks or months at a time that I haven't looked at yet). Within Konqueror, I have a minimum of 3 tabs open, though frequently more, I'm not sure about an average there.
Also, what about multiple
One, maybe two. (Score:2)
5 at the most (Score:2)
I'm always shocked by how many people do have open, like seeing someones FF with 20-30+ tabs up. Are there really ever 30 essential pages that need to be up right now?
Windows Isn't a Great Metric (Score:2)
When I first read.. (Score:2)
Total of 23 windows on current workspace.
I have two more windows (openoffice writer and yet another browser window) on another workspace.
What about Windows IN Windows (Score:2)
~5 (Score:2)
Number of windows proportional to amount of monito (Score:2)
Nothing is wrong with a lot (Score:2)
Maybe pick another question? (Score:2)
When writing I've usually got a browser, filer window, thumbnail browser, text editor and FTP client "open" (but only one maximised at a time -- never been able to get to grips with lots of windows on top of each other, personally, despite growing up with RISC OS) with email, music and a dictionary app t
Meh, I have 25 windows open just for GAIM (Score:2)
Depends on what I'm doing (Score:2)
About 15 open windows with tabs (Score:2)
Opera (browser), Crimson Editor (text), Two e-mail applications, Perforce (version control), an internal development application, usually three copies of Word, one of Excel, a calculator, a copy of the game, a controlling window for said game, something playing music, Photoshop, Palm Desktop, Skype, Trillian. Sometimes add in Illustrator, sometimes add in VC+
The number of the counting shall be three (Score:4, Funny)
OTOH, if you have just one window and do everything inside Emacs or XEmacs, you can eliminate window managers too and just run xemacs full-screen (fiddle with the -geometry option) straight from your
Depends on how you count them (Score:2)
Right now I have 16 different windows. But two of those are IDEs with lots of opened files in tabs; one is a text editor with 9 files in tabs; and, of course, there is Firefox with 27 tabs (thanks God for the improved tab management in Firefox 2.0).
I also keep windows in the same place for days between log-offs.
2 cents (Score:2)
I'm an OSX & Firefox user. Under heavy use my macbook will have 3-5 tabbed browser windows each with 10-20 tabs each. On top of that, i'd be running adium, itunes, textmate with 3-4 projects open at once, preview w/ 4-12 documents open, a couple terminal windows open, and usually 4 finder windows open.
So, a whole lot, so probably upwards of 20 actual windows, and numerous tabs in a number of
my desktop (Score:2)
Varies (Score:2)
Thunderbird
J-Pilot
FireFox (3-50 tabs)
Virtual desktop 2:
6-8 terminal sessions (dev/admin - multiple machines)
Virtual desktop 4/5:
More terminal sessions constantly tailing logs for quick system checks
Virtual desktops 3/6:
Available for word-processing, image editing, or whatever misc task I need at the moment.
Usually six or seven, but lots and lots of tabs... (Score:2)
Right now (Score:2)
Right now on my work PC I have 9 windows open. My browser has 2 tabs open, and Visual Studio has 1 tab. Typically, I'll have 1-3 browser open with about 5 tabs each, 7-18 tabs in Visual Studio, and 2-5 Explorer (file system) windows open.
I try to close Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets when I no longer need them so I can save memory.
On my personal PCs I keep much less open. This is because I primarily use them for email. When I do serious computing at home, my personal e
Mixtures... And to many! (Score:2)
It's all about the virtual desktop switching (Score:2)
Seriously, I got hooked on using multiple desktops under Linux and I can't go back. It's one of th
Window Count on OS X (Score:2)
On my MacBook (1.83GHz Core Duo with 512MB RAM), I usually have the following applications open:
Depending on the task on hand, I may have a word processor, text editor, some X terminals and X11 applications (via a SSH tunn
10, of course (Score:2)
20 windows (4 with multiple tabs) (Score:2)
23 Windows, 7 Firefox tabs, 3 monitors (Score:2)
How many windows (Score:2)
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
well lets see here I have 17 windows opened for various ajax, java, c++ and other misc nerdy work I'm doing. I have no less than 8 different browsers open at any given time, currently opera with 8 tabs, firefox with 6, IE7 with 9 different tabs, Netscape, Lynx, and a couple other browsers each have one. Mozilla has 47 as I'm currently doing uh..research.
I'm also defragging my torrents which requires another 4 windows, and I'm writing this slashdot entry through a special program I wrote which opens a tab for every sentence. All this on my custom built (I poured the plastic myself when I was 3) 36 inch desktop ultra super flat LCD.
Asking a "who has more" question on slashdot is inviting a nerd flexing contest.
right now (Score:2)
On my Debian Sarge box running Gnome:
21 windows open on two virtual desktops (of 8 available);
- 3 are firefox, one with 11 tabs, one with 3 tabs, one with 1 tab;
- 11 are terminals, all but one ssh'd to one of two remote machines;
- 2 are remote desktops, one VNC and one Remote Desktop;
- 1 is a text editor, which itself has 5 tabs open.
- 2 are spreadsheets, one with 3 tabs and one with 12 tabs.
100% memory in use, 53% in cache, haven't rebooted
Lots o windows (Score:2)
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Very few (Score:2)
Desktop setup (Score:2)
Upper left: Web, console, maybe music player. Actually, this and all further "consoles" are actually Konsole, which is the best console app I've had by far. (I was xterm for a long time, but the way KDE m
Many... (Score:2)
It depends on how old our first machines were (Score:2)
I usually get uncomfortable when I have more than 3 apps opened until recently when memory became more plentiful. Today I have around 4 or 5 and 2 or 3 tabs on firefox.
THe reason behind this is I remember teh days of running Windows 3.11 on 4 megs of ram and Windows95 on 8 megs of ram. TO get the best performance for games you needed to create your own autoexec.bat and config.sys files for DOS. I used Windows only for boring things like AOL 1.
Title goes here (Score:2)
I run dual 21" monitors, I have 10-12 applications open at any time, I leave them open most of the time, even if i'm not using them at the moment. One or two of those apps is always mozilla, and I'll have a random number of tabs open (usually a dozen, sometimes more than can be counted if I'm researching something, sometimes only a few if I'm finishing up). I have 6 quicklaunch icons, and another 6 hotkeys on my trackball to launch more stuff.
hth hand
Varies too much to say (Score:2)
Right now I've only got my "all the time" windows hanging around. Firefox is usually there, as is Emacs running Slime, an xclock, and a terminal dedicated to my sound card mixer. I also have a drop-down console a la Quake.
Of course, when I'm working on something the number can spiral up: a word processor, a couple more Firefox windows to keep my work stuff separate
My Window Usage (Score:2)
Firefox, Outlook, Zend Studio (or other editor), 2 terminals
Anything else that I use is opened on an as-needed basis. When I see some of the other developers at work with a half dozen browser windows (not tabs - windows), four terminals, an editor, email client, a few instances of notepad, a database GUI, maybe an HTML editor
Honest snapshot is 5 (Score:2)
And spread across three or four pager screens.
Neatness is next to Godliness you know.
Age, maybe? (Score:2)
Personally, I try to minimize the number of apps I have open at any given time. If I'm not actually using the program, it's closed. I've got the same range of apps instal
Two (Score:2)
Buy more RAM, use sleep/suspend, be happy. (Score:2)
Why restart your Mac every five days? It's not Windows 95 you know.
My Mac currently has 28 open windows, from 14 different applications. 7 tabs in Firefox. Uptime is 23 days. This is typical. It sleeps when I'm not using it; I once worked out the trade-off point was about 8-12 hours of sleep = one bootup, in terms of energy consumption. It gets restarted every couple of months when there's an OS update that requires it. I don't close an application unless I only use it rarely and it's a bit of a memory
Windows on Mac OS X (Score:2)
I just counted 16 windows (spread over eleven apps) and 5 browser tabs open.
This laptop rarely gets shut down, it usually just sleeps between uses. Restarts are probably every two or three weeks.
Even when working in meatspace I used to work in layers on my physical desk. As a project manager/engineer I'd often have a large number of simultaneous projects running, and needed rapid access to all of them, depending on who the next call ca
Only 5 windows between restarts? (Score:2)
Yes that does include about 5 different firefox windows with at least 3-4 tabs each that are "Static research" tabs that I have open for quite a while.
My work system has MORE windows open as it has a dual monitor setup. Plus if you count all the sticky notes open there, that's about a dozen more. I need to get a se
Six windows (Score:2)
No suprise (Score:3, Interesting)
Inexperienced users, or those who prefer to focus on one task at a time, generally want to keep one single window open. I know this, since most customers that I've helped troubleshoot tend to close browser windows for their Router configuration page as soon as I want to open a command prompt window.
Some users feel that running too many applications at once can slow down the system - in a way they are correct, but they also know that multitasking is more efficient than closing down the application window.
Naturally, you have a crowd that works on mutliple things at once, and are willing to open as many windows as necessary - they either activly use these windows, or have them waiting in the background when done with the current task. This is what I do normally, but right now, I only have ~2 windows open since I'm using a laptop. I have no problem opening up much more windows on a real computer.
And after reading this thread, you have users that open windows "just in case." Enough said.
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At work I average 1 day between restarts (it is after all a policy to log out at the end of the day, perfect time for a restart) and keep 7-10 windows +7 browser tabs open during the workday. 8 if I'm also reading technocrat- for some reason our firewall isn't compatible with firefox for reading technocrat, so I need to use IE for that.
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Also, do you mean a virtual desktop program for windows like this [sourceforge.net]?
48 days, 41 windows (Score:2)
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I don't know about the original poster, but my apartment is all-electric: in the winter, it doesn't matter if the computer is running or not, I'll be using the same amount of electricity. If the energy's going to be used, I'd prefer to be turning out F@H workunits than doing nothing with it.
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BTW you don't get charged per watt. You get charged per kilowatt-hour.
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Have you never heard of sleep/suspend or hibernate? Even Windows can run for weeks without breaking a sweat these days. You can also buy quiet computers, or mod your own to make it quieter. If the fan noise is enough to keep you awake at night it's enough to harm your concentration when you're coding
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Microsoft loves people that frequently power-cycle
their machines.
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I shut my computers down every night and they still last a stupid long time. They probably would last longer than you probably would want to use it, and multiply that by three. I have an eight year old computer that's still running fine. I can't say that I've had a circuit board failure in a decade, I just don't remember the last time it's been a problem. If it's a problem, it would be a problem for the circuit boards in
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Maybe it's a waste to you, but different people have different priorities. Science always takes energy and time from other activities, but it often results in net energy savings in the long run. For a rather ironic example, take a look at http://climateprediction.net/ [climateprediction.net]. The project expects
Forget the environment then... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you realize that an average 300+ watt machine running 24/7 costs you about $15-$20 a month in electricity?
If you don't believe me get a power usage meter.
You're basically paying $20 a month for the privilege of contributing to Folding@home or whatever. You're trying to say that money wouldn't do more good being given to your local food bank or something?
No thanks.
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Well duh! Those transformers and magnets suck up a lot of juice.
But that's what VESA and EnergyStar are for. Set xscreensaver for Off After 20 minutes, and go to work, school, bed, etc.
and if you care at all how much power you use, you should buy an lcd)
Or save a bunch of money and buy a 20" flat-screen CRT that powers off after 20 minutes.
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The end result? One month's usage, including occasional laser printer use, added up to less than a 100-watt light bulb left powered for 24/7. Is that insignificant? Depends -- certainly compared to my monthly DSL line cost, it is, and for my purposes the gain is worthwhile.
Having said that, if I could power it reliably with solar without bre
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If you have a 200W computer on, then you have the equivalent of a 200W heater. Not really that big a deal.
However, you are also generating information. Is this against the laws of thermodynamics?
Discuss.
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they do, it's the virtual desktop manager (VDM) power toy, and it's a free download for Windows XP.
I love the way people who don't know shit about windows love to criticize microsoft for bullshit reasons. There are plenty of reasons to blame them, you don't have to make s
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I love the way people who don't know shit about windows love to criticize microsoft for bullshit reasons. There are plenty of reasons to blame them, you don't have to make shit up.
And I love the way people who insist they know about Windows and *nix are quick to point out similarities which aren't similar at all. Put another way, Microsoft's VDM is a toy along the lines of notepad. It sucks. YMMV, but its a
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Re:Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
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I usually keep about 10 win
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but on average.. i would say 10-20 that i am currently working on.. not counting the stuff hidden in the tray..
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Main (work) machine:
modo and/or Maya
Photoshop
Zbrush
Explorer for transferring texture files, 3d model files, etc.
musikCube for listening to music.
Secondary machine:
IRC client
Usually two or more instances of Firefox. I keep seperate windows open for seperate subjects. For instance, one Firefox window may have