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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."
...but how do you simulate the hardware incompatibilities? I suppose you could get all your old peripherals a pour coffee in them, but I don't think that's really going to give you the same sense of frustration that you'd get with Vista.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I'm not sure of the value of tacking on features to XP to make it more like Vista, especially when such features cost money. I mean, if you want Vista-like stuff, why don't you just pay the upgrade fee and get a complete, well-tested package instead of a bunch of disjoint shareware utilities?
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
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.
to seperate userinterface from operating system..
I mean, the article has a nice list of things you can do instead of upgrading to Vista,
however the main principle that is highlighted has been logic to most developers for decades:
1. Seperate logic from userinterface
2. Seperate into small logical components
3. you achieve better programs which are easier to maintain and upgrade. (which is often as good as profit)
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Runs fine for me. Only problem I have had is a faulty HP DVD-Rom driver.
All you need to run Vista happily is an Intel quad-core overclocked to 4GHz, 4Gb RAM and twin nVidia 8800 GTX video cards.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
As the article admits, there is no current way to get DirectX 10 onto XP. Though the article makes a good point that there are very few DirectX 10 games on the market, they will eventually come and diehard gamers will face a difficult choice. This could be MS's only workable strategy for general Vista adoption because, fundamentally, there is no reason that anyone would want to use Windows anymore aside from games (or because of mandated OS at employer, though that situation raises the question of why the CIO hasn't be fired for gross negligence in funds appropriations, especially for Vista, which doesn't run Office 2000 any better than XP).
On the other hand, maybe game developers will shy away from DirectX 10 because of the risk of losing a sizable market share. Diehard gamers could also prove finicky. Could this artificial attempt to tie DirectX10 with Vista to force upgrades result in a resurgence of OpenGL adoption in the gaming industry? One can only hope.
Apparently with Vista, even your keyboard or DVD-ROM drive can be rendered incompatible.
Me, I'm still trying to track down the driver for my monitor, so I can get the blazed thing out of 640x480 16 colors.
I gave up on the mouse. It was a Microsoft mouse, but last year's rev.
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.
I tried the beta a while back and was unimpressed. Then, yesterday, I went out and bought a laptop with the intention of putting Ubuntu on it. It came with Vista Home on it. I gave it a chance while the Ubuntu installer was downloading. Holy crap, it actually got worse. It seems like they ripped stuff off from OS X solely for the sake of ripping it off. The sidebar that contains "gadgets" is a complete waste of screen real estate, with a distracting slideshow and a completely redundant clock a few hundred pixels above the taskbar clock by default. It was slow as hell, and the eyecandy made the machine grind to a halt. All in all, the interface was made less navigable and slower.
The story has a happy ending, though. After Ubuntu's installer crashed and Gentoo proved to be a pain in the ass, I traded it in for a Mac.
I've been using Stardock's Windowblinds for 2 years now. Recently I started using some of their other interface changing tools as well.
Windowblinds makes Windows XP SOOOO much nicer in my opinion. I wouldn't run XP without it. I love being able to customize my interface, change whatever I want, when I want.
The community at www.wincustomize.com is fantastic, and people are always designing new skins, new backgrounds, etc.
Stardock is fantastic. I love their products a ton.
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.
Yod'm 3D
Beryl-style cube desktop on Windows. Makes using the inferior OS a little better.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I read TFA.
I learned absolutely nothing about earning money by putting my XP to work performing sex acts with others.
"You're an idiot" not "Your an idiot" calling someone an idiot, and misspelling the first word, sort of nagates the whole post, don't you think?
Can't go wrong with Explorer Breadcrumbs -- I'm using it on XP right now, and I don't miss Vista one bit.
Output Firwall £20 (a year)
Directory Opus £35
Stardock £25
Total cost of Pimping your copy of XP to look like Vista £80, the look on your friends face as you tell them you bought Vista Home Basic for £56 Here
Priceless
In all seriousness why bother? The feature's discussed are all availiable in Home Basic and even if you compare this 'pimping' to the Home Premimum edition you can still get Vista cheaper (£70 at This site ) The only reason not to upgrade to Vista and doing this would be hardware incompatibility or your machine isn't capable of running it well (say you've only got 512mb of ram.)
If you are hoping that I'm going to tell you now some way of getting DirectX 10 to work on Vista, you are going to be disappointed.
"A deadlock has been reached. One task must die. We must now choose between murder and suicide."
I have a fully licensed copy of Win2K Pro that I have faithfully moved from machine to machine for the past 7 years. It doesn't require registration, is rock solid, and does everything that I need it to do as well as XP or better, including software development and gaming.
I'll update from 2K when my disk and all the backups rot (must remember to take another), or I absolutely need hardware that absolutely won't support 2K. Until then, as far as I'm concerned, Microsoft peaked 7 years ago, and it's been all downhill from there.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Not a mention of the Vista Transformation Pack in the article?
The VTP makes XP look like Vista, doesn't slow down your computer, and is free. It includes several freeware apps such as a Sidebar, a Start Orb, etc. It is really polished the new version is supposed to be released Monday.
You can also get Vista games on XP.
And with KDE being ported to Windows with KDE 4, you'll also be able to get both Konqueror and Dolphin on XP if you want to try another file manager without shelling out $70.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
FUD.
.NET Framework 1.1.
You do not need drivers for your mouse or monitor to work in Vista or XP for that matter. Drivers may allow some additional functionality, but nothing that I've ever seen to be necessary in either OS.
I've installed vista on numerous PCs, at home, in the office and on an old Lenovo R50e. I've not had hardware conflicts, I've not experienced instability, and the only showstopping incompatibility I've experienced is ironically with MS' own
I've managed to find drivers for every card and peripheral except an older Soundblaster.
SLi is supported (and activated) on the chipset at boot time, not at the OS level; The driver does control it, however. A good few users have claimed a large increase in graphics speed going back to XP from Vista, mainly due to the fact that DX9 rendering in Vista is (supposedly) slower than DX10 rendering.
Not that SLi provides much of a performance increase for what you're spending, anyway. nVidia chips are faster per-card, but the truly great scalers are the ATi cards, whose Radeons (and Radeon HDs) offer more performance per extra card in Crossfire than the GeForces in SLi, though each card is less powerful.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Is that both of those games are DX9! We still don't have any DX10 goodness (save for the Lost Planet DX 10 Demo and Company of Heroes if the patch came out)
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
"You do not need drivers for your mouse or monitor to work in Vista or XP for that matter."
O RLY!?
Try writing an OS kernel and NOT including drivers for keyboard or VGA, and see how it works.
Generic driver == no driver?
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.
Vista is running all sorts of DRM on top of it's not very efficient or thrilling UI. The cost of adding a few skins is going to be less than that. Yahoo widgets along give the user a clock, weather and that kind of thing, without any performance hit.
But really, the further you get away from M$ the better your computing gets. The real upgrades are free. Most of the visual elements have been available in the nix world for decades. The performance gain of moving to GNU/Linux is incredible and it can be had for less than 2GB of system files that auto configure and run live off a 650MB boot CD. Why buy car tweaks or a new car when you could just download a space ship for free?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I dual boot debian and w2k. W2K is fast, secure, reliable, runs all my hw and sw, and has none of that authentication cr@p. Why people would bother with XP, much less Vista, is beyond me. Do people like bloat, or a fisher-price interface, or the authentication nightmare, or having to learn a new UI, or just giving msft more money?
I dunno, maybe it's just gamers?
No offense to the author, but the linked article is barely informative. I don't even know how this made it to the front page. But
the subject is interesting, as there is a bunch of cool freeware software to make XP be like (or even better than) Vista. You
don't need to spend a single dollar. So this is my real list of programs to Pimp your XP:
1. Lauchy: www.launchy.com
Some may say that this is the poor man's QuickSilver. Maybe it is, but in the Windows world there are few programs as useful as
Launchy. Install it and you won't need to access your start menu anymore.
2. Quizo's Explorer toolbars: http://quizo.at.infoseek.co.jp/freeware/indexEn.ht ml
These are 2 free toolbars that make Windows Explorer as good as Directory Opus (IMHO) for free:
* QTTabBar: Adds firefox-style tabs to windows explorer. It also adds a cool incremental search feature, and a customizable
toolbar where you can add folder shortcuts, etc
* QTAddressBar: Explorer breadcrumbs!
3. FileBox eXtender: http://www.hyperionics.com/files/index.asp
This is one of the most useful little pieces of software that I've used. I adds 2 buttons to the title bar of every windows dialog
and of every windows explorer window. One button gives you access to your "favorite folders" (which you can easily change) and the
other one gives you access to your "folder history". With these, going back and forth between folders to open or save files
becomes a snap. The only problem is that the default button icons a kind of ugly, but they can be easily changed.
4. Findexer: http://tomseffect.com/
Substitutes the windows explorer sidebar for a place where you can put links to your preferred folders. If you use FileBox
eXtender (see above) this might not be as useful, but I still like to use it.
5. TaskBar Shuffle: http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.ht m
Another really useful program. With it you can reorder the window buttons in the windows taskbar. It can even automatically group
windows from the same program without collapsing them. You can also reorder the tray icons in the system tray.
6. Free Launch Bar: http://www.freelaunchbar.com/
Make the windows Quick Launch bar much more useful with this free replacement. It adds the ability to have folders inside the
quick launch bar, and have shortcuts within those folders.
7. LClock: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Enhancements/ Clocks-Time-Management/LClock.shtml
A nice replacement to the windows clock in the system tray. It looks much better and is more useful as it shows a calendar when
you click on it. But the reason I recommend it is that it can also hide or reduce the size of the start menu button! Once you
start using Launchy (see above) you will not use the start menu very often, so I like to recover the taskbar real state that it
uses unnecessarily. To do so, with LClock you can reduce it by substituting the start menu image with a much smaller one.
8. MenuApp: http://www.freewaregenius.com/2006/11/02/menuapp/
Customize the explorer context menu with this tool. It comes with a lot of built-in actions, such as Command Prompt here, Create a
Folder, copy filename to path, etc.
There are other tools that you can use, but which I personally don't (although I've tried or used them in the past):
1. RocketDock: http://www.punksoftware.com/rocketdoc
Security
"....the new security measures, specifically User Account Controls."
UAC is useless and annoying. It might be fine for my Aunt Mildred, who only turns her computer on a couple of times a week to surf the web for a few minutes and send one or two e-mails, but for anyone who actually want to get things done, Vista is virtually unusable unless you turn off UAC. In the long run, UAC will make things worse because clueless users, who have absolutely no idea whether foobar.exe is a legit program or malware, will simply start clicking 'Yes' to everything.
Windows Explorer
"Windows explorer featured several significant upgrades in Vista."
WTF? Numerous features in the XP version of Windows Explorer have been removed or changed in ways that make them less useful. Customize the toolbar? Gone. In fact the whole Toolbar is gone. Status bar shows total size of all the files in a directory? XP yes. Vista no. The list goes on.
Search
"Windows Vista's integrated desktop search is one of my favourite new features"
Purely a personal preference, Desktop search is meaningless to me. I have thousands of files in dozens of directories and rarely need to use search to find them. In all fairness, XP's search is so horrible and less than useless, that anything will seem better.
Look and feel
Look - don't care.
Feel - Vista feels slow and clunky on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP with 2 gig of RAM. It only feels slightly better on my new dual-core 2.8ghz machine with 4 gig RAM.
Media Center and Games
Vista doesn't really do anything that's better than XP. And that's the real problem with Vista. People have long knocked XP as nothing more than a fancied up Windows 2000. And there's some truth to that. But, everyone forgets that when XP first came out, most people were running Windows 95/98 -- quite possibly the two worst pieces of crap software ever created. XP represented a major improvement. Vista, in many ways, is a giant step backwards.
Research shows that most pimps live with their mothers in order to pay the rent. They also fail quickly if they mess with the merchandise. The ghetto worship that leads to this terminology has everything backwards.
1. Download theme (optional)
2. Remove half your ram.
3. Clock the CPU down by about 20%.
Where's the big deal?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is a work around for using the Upgrade Version on a blank disk. http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5932 The purpose of the upgrade version is that it is installed from within an existing XP installation so that it can revoke the old XP license. MS has closed the loop hole of people buying the upgrade version, keeping an old XP disk around, and using it as a new license.
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
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."