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Pimp Your XP
An anonymous reader writes "Ezinearticles.com has up an interesting article on how you can improve Windows XP to mimic and even surpass Vista — at least some of its new features. Several of the suggestions cost money and others are free. From improving the user interface with Stardock to mimicking new security features with open source software such as Sudown, the article discusses many ways that die-hard XP users can enhance their environment without moving to Vista."
The author mentions costs all the way through this article, this costs, that costs, and none of it is cheap. I got an OEM vista ultimate for £120 ($240) which from the looks of it is actually cheaper than the cost of pimping my XP.
Not to mention, this is a hell of alot of software, I mean, he's talking about installing several toys that will run 24/7 and of course this is gonna sap your processing power, and its not integrated, so it'll probably end up using more resources than vista.
It seems that this article completely skips over the possibility of replacing Explorer with something less crap. I don't just mean the file browser, I mean the desktop, start menu, etc.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
We recently bought an OEM version of Vista at work in order to test our software on it and become a little more familiar with it. My colleague and myself dislike it with a passion. Not merely the interface but also the way they managed to re-shuffle a lot of options and settings around. Even though while most of them had quite logical places in XP.
;-)
My colleague doesn't like all the fancyness on the desktop (not merely talking about Vista here, same applies to XP) and so he always changes everything to be as clear as possible. To my surprise this is still possible in Vista! It took him a few minutes but in the end he managed to end up with a desktop which manages to resemble Windows 98 in quite some detail.
To be honost this still strikes me as odd. On the other hand it also makes me convinced that the Windows 98 interface isn't as bad or obsolete as some people portrait it.
The only thing I'm wondering about now though is if its also possible to give Vista an XP look
I've been running a copy of Vista Business I got for free, and I'm trying to get it to run more like XP. Any utilities for that, because Vista is runs like a dog. I disabled all the prettiness, but it's still slow.
Bzzzt!
Vista doesn't support SLI properly yet. Any support it does have, causes massive performance cuts. Trust me. I saw a 50% increase in speed when going from Vista to XP on a monster PC. 3DMark2006 score went from 10,000 to over 13,000 just with an OS change.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
That includes OEM licenses. Like the one I'm not using because I downgraded my new Laptop to XP after it wouldn't run my stuff in Vista. Of course, not everyone has done this but many have.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I don't think there has ever been a new MS OS release that has run faster on the same hardware than its predecessor.
I managed to get Vista business running pretty much like 2K, I don't really feel the need to have all the shiny, bloated stuff. One of the main reasons I even switched to Vista (aside from receiving it as a free upgrade) is to check out DirectX 10.
More alarming than some new MS games for windows (Halo 2 and Shadowrun) REQUIRING vista to play, is the fact that to play online you have to pony up for Xbox Live..I wish MS the best of luck convincing PC users to get leeched like they've managed with their console gamers, no way in hell I'm paying for online play for an FPS.
This is true; However, XP was a major departure from what we had seen in the past, and it was scary - It was a true, user-oriented NT-based OS that was actually very solid and offered a few neat new features (one of the most prominent of which being the Windows Firewall of SP2), as well as having much better plug and play support. As I recall, the lack of DOS support and many Windows 3.1 to 95-era games and applications failing to work, coupled with relatively high system requirements for the time, caused most of the delay for the migration from 98/ME/2k and XP. As more applications came about to replace those of yesteryear that actually worked on XP, and as emulation such as DOSbox became popular, and as more powerful machines became cheaper, more people went with XP. All this and I haven't mentioned XP's crash rate was, and is, far lower than Win9x, which on modern hardware would require a reboot after 12 hours of uptime with anything of consequence running, due to massive memory leaks in the 9x kernel, all non-issues in XP.
Vista, however, when you look at it for what it is, is basically Windows XP with a hardware-accelerated GUI (which is cool), some parental controls, an idiot check, and even less compatibility with both software and hardware than I believe even XP had when it was first released (especially if you consider 16-bit apps). So many of the planned features were ripped completely from the OS, and its continued delays caused me to personally become quite skeptical of the necessity of Vista to begin with, not to mention another bout of the need for relatively powerful hardware that many OEMs aren't even providing (512MB of RAM on Vista? What are you guys thinking?). The security aspect of things really hasn't changed much, IE7 is still more insecure than any other browser, (early) video drivers can often crash or lock the system outright, and the installer takes forever just to get to the point where you can choose a destination drive and enter your serial - No disk activity is happening, just a long, drawn-out three minute pause between clicking "Next" and actually seeing the next screen. Vista takes forever and a day to install in comparison to other operating systems, even on systems that easily exceed the system requirements. XP's install was closer in completion time to 2k's (probably because it was pretty much the same installer), which was very reasonable. All this not to mention Windows Live OneCare, which, while a separate product, is very much related to Vista, and is one of the worst products in the security market.
Vista's cool, though. It has that flashy cool factor, but that's not really a selling point for an MS OS; I want something that's going to work, and something that's not going to bring my system to its knees just to boot the damned thing.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Because of virtualization.
Windows 2k runs MUCH better in Parallels or VMware than XP does- there is not the hint of sluggishness. Plus it does not require activation (great for having many different virtual machines on the same system) and it works with almost every application that XP does (cept for some things you don't want to virtualize like games).
Every since I got my Macbook, my Windows 2000 disk has been one of my prized possetions. I imagine because of advantages in Parallels I will see my last XP desktop before I see my last Windows 2k one....
Open Source Sushi
Low resources,nice look,and I even get the "spinning cube" multi desktop like on my Linux Laptop.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
From that site...
"As a fitting start to this blog, I'm proud to release a preview of our Alky compatibility libraries for Microsoft DirectX 10 enabled games. These libraries allow the use of DirectX 10 games on platforms other than Windows Vista, and increase hardware compatibility even on Vista, by compiling Geometry Shaders down to native machine code for execution where hardware isn't capable of running it. No longer will you have to upgrade your OS and video card(s) to play the latest games.
The current preview allows you to run a number of examples from the Microsoft DirectX SDK on Windows XP. They're not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but we want to whet your appetite."