Thoughts by Techxplorer

Over the past couple of days I’ve had the unenviable task of visiting a large number of staff computers here in the Library. The systems team here needed to roll out a new client for our ILMS and for a variety of reasons ended up doing it manually.

I was expecting to see a number of different resolutions and other customisations, I wasn’t prepared for the depth and variety of customisations that people have done to their work computers. For example people had:

• Changed their desktop backgrounds to show personal photos
• Changed their desktop backgrounds to show photos of favourite TV/Movie stars
• Installed alternate screen savers
• Altered the colour scheme used by Microsoft Windows
• Loaded different icon and mouse cursor themes
• A desktop that is completely consumed by icons for applications and other files
• Other more subtle customisations

It got me thinking about what you can tell about someone based on their computers. For example you can tell what may be a favourite TV/Movie of theirs is, what may be their favourite colours and other interests they may have. I wonder what my computer would say about me…

I have a black desktop background with a small, less than 50% of the screen, background image from one of the photo Blogs I regularly visit.  I have a minimum number of icons on my desktop, primarily for files I’m working on right now, and applications I use frequently.

The icons are arranged into groups reflecting their use. For example all of the applications I used for accessing our Unix servers, and editing Unix files, are grouped together. I haven’t changed the default colour theme, and leave all of the other settings at their defaults. I wonder what this says about me…

What does your computer say about you?