Vistarising XP

There have been a number of posts on Lifehacker and How-To-Geek about nifty little tips, tricks and tools to add nice Vista features to XP. Yet, of those I’ve come across few seem to work without glitches. 

I tried installing the Vista Sidebar and Gadget pack but without success. Alky installed fine, but the actual Sidebar tool kept on failing to load. [via gHacks] So much for having gadgets in XP.

Then I tried installing Shock Aero 3D to get the Vista-looking WinKey+Tab feature which seemed to work nicely and it has various options for display and background effects. [via Lifehacker] This seemed to load and works well without any problems. 

Next thing I liked and wanted to try out was Visual Task Tips which shows you previews of windows as you move your cursor over the item in the taskbar. [via How-to-Geek] Very handy feature which seemed to work well. Doesn’t like Google Chrome Application Windows though.

I’m really keen to see more from Windows 7 – if they can get rid of the need for their OS to run on Deep Blue and fix hardware compatibility issues (which also relies on vendors delivering drivers) then maybe one-day more people will move to Windows 7 than they did to Vista. But for now, I’m sticking to XP, thanks!

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