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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.
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.
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!