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Regarding Windows 2008/R2: I've changed my desk-top color to red. I've played with the "appearance settings", but none of them are tolerable to the eye. Is there something I else I can do to make production look different? Obviously, I don't want to run something dangerous when on Prod when I think that I'm on test or QA.

Ideas: 1) Anything in the task bar? 2) What about a small pop-up program that always comes to the foreground? Any such free program exist?

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Don't forget to colorize the command prompt too, Windows+R with the wrong focus, format d: and you're done :)) – Tiberiu-Ionuț Stan Aug 23 '12 at 22:56

4 Answers

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I'm not sure how the Windows 2008 taskbar icons can be resized. Windows 7 lets you choose 'Small icons' in the taskbar properties. (Taskbar and Start Menu Properties, Taskbar tab, check Use small icons).

Or change the size for the quicklaunch bar icons.

Would that be distinctive enough for you?

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Best answer yet, I don't know why everybody above is so stuck on the desktop which I specifically said was not my issue. Even auto-hiding the task bar is a good idea. But I don't see "small icons" on Win 2008/R2. – NealWalters Aug 24 '12 at 15:27
up vote 23 down vote

BGInfo from Sysinternals is a free program that's very common in enterprise environments. Configured to run at user logon, it can not only make the desktop look aesthetically unique, but can also display useful information about the server.

Also, you could consider pushing, via GPO, custom Powershell profiles and Cmd.exe settings that change their colors from the defaults on all production as well.

Just a couple ideas.

Edit: Beaten by a second. -_-

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Haha, the ever competitive world of ServerFault, where seconds count! :P For what it's worth I liked your explanation better. – John K Aug 23 '12 at 13:45
+1 - I use BGInfo and a startup script to deploy it to servers and run it against the HKEY_USERS\.Default profile. On Windows Server 2003 machines that causes the logon screen to display the BGInfo details. (I'm sad this is gone from W2K8 and newer OS's.) I force the user wallpaper to the BGInfo wallpaper using a custom administrative template and loopback policy processing to force it irrespective of the user's personal policy settings. – Evan Anderson Aug 23 '12 at 21:29
+1 Yup, this is exactly what I've always done too. I typically use an orange color theme for the CLI and an orange-tinted background with "PRODUCTION" plastered all over the place for production systems, on account of not wanting my eyes to bleed fro using red everywhere, but anything that's hard to miss to distinguish it from environments you can screw up in works well. – HopelessN00b Aug 24 '12 at 0:41
up vote 10 down vote

Some great ideas I've seen -

1.) Stick a long, deep red bar across the top and bottom of the background image. I've found this to be unobtrusive and pretty helpful.

2.) Some darker red text on the default blue background also looks pretty good without hurting the eyes.

3.) You might take a look at BGInfo. It's a useful utility that prints various data about the server over the background

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897557.aspx

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Red color is good enough for deskop, but the problem with that is I don't usually see the desktop. But I usually have big windows open and I need the utilities that I use full screen to do my work. I need something to re-color over sit on top of my full-screen utilities. – NealWalters Aug 23 '12 at 16:33
I usually keep QA and PROD both open on two different RDPs. I use SQL, Biztalk Admin, Total Commander, and 3 or 4 other programs, all open at once. – NealWalters Aug 23 '12 at 16:35
up vote 0 down vote

You could also use a login message that warns the user that they are on a production system.

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No good, I stay logged on all day, and constantly bounce between the systems. – NealWalters Aug 24 '12 at 15:27

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