Refresh your Windows desktop with these freebies [BT broadband office]

Refresh your Windows desktop with these freebies

Posted 18 June 2007 at 8:39AM by Simon Dickson in IT systems and support

Let's be honest, it can get very dull staring at the same old Windows XP interface all day - and the price/hassle of upgrading to Vista doesn't seem worth it. But there's plenty of life in the operating system yet, and I've found a few excellent freebies which might rekindle the love you once felt for your old PC.

iColorFolder is a very simple tool which allows you to change the default icon for your PC's folders, and then specify a particular colour for a particular folder. Old news to Mac users, of course - but since the old yellow folder icon is the one you see most of, it's a simple change which makes quite a difference. Adding some colour-coding to your folders doesn't sounds like much, but it really helps to pick out the ones you use most often.

One I particularly love - despite the fact that, if anything, it slows things down a little - is UberIcon, which adds some Mac-style special effects to the act of clicking on an icon. Make them explode, fade, ripple or squish using the plugins which come by default, or the extra ones on offer at the application's website. There's no real practical use for it, apart perhaps from making it very obvious that you have clicked on something, as opposed to simply pointing at it. But it looks fab, and it blows people away.

My favourite XP enhancement is still the addition of a sidebar to the edge of your (wide)screen: we covered this in a previous post. A more radical departure is ObjectDock, which brings a Mac-style application dock to the bottom of your screen. Hover over it with your mouse, and all sorts of animations kick in. It looks absolutely fantastic, but it doesn't really work in conjunction with the Windows 'Start' bar. And sadly, if forced to choose, the 'Start' bar has to win.

But all this is nothing compared to the flexibility and functionality you get from Shell Enhancer. Among the ton of extra features it adds to your XP system are two new 'alt-tab' displays of active programs and a host of transparency effects, which give your desktop a little something extra. Configuring it is a bit of an effort, to be honest, but it's worth it.

Tags: desktop, enhancements, freeware, windows xp

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Comments

1. At June 21, 2007 4:50 PM, Thomas Buist wrote:

One of the best Windows enhancers I have come across is Windows Blinds. It allows you to completely modify the look and feel of your windows interface in a similar way that windows styles worked in Windows 98. There is also StyleXP, which does the same thing but is much more system heavy.

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