Vista Without Vista
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Are you not quite ready for Vista? Or are you ready, but your computer’s not? :-) I’m sure there’s a variety of reasons why you won’t be able or willing to upgrade when Vista becomes widely available later this month. However, just because you’re still using XP doesn’t mean you can’t enhance your computing experience with some Vista-like functionality.
Better Search
Vista’s Search is integrated throughout the OS, and it’s so much better than XP’s search companion that a comparison is insulting. This one’s a no-brainer to get on XP. If you don’t already have Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop, download one of them immediately. I prefer WDS 3.0 myself, because it feels a little more integrated into the Windows environment, but they’ll both do the trick.
Explorer Breadcrumbs
While I still sometimes miss the "Go up" button when using Vista, the breadcrumb is a much more usable way to get around a folder hierarchy. Pick up Minimalist‘s Explorer Breadcrumbs, and you’ll get something pretty darn close in XP.
Start Bar Search
In Vista, when you hit the Start button, you can type some text and it’ll automatically search your applications in the Start menu and match on what you type. So if you type "word" both Microsoft Word and WordPad will pop up. Once you select one, it remembers, so the next time you want to start Word, you can just press the Start button (either using the mouse or the Windows Key on the keyboard, which is faster), type "word" and press enter. Fast.
Power users have been doing something similar on XP and Server 2003 using the "Run…" menu for years. Win+R to bring up the menu, then type the cryptic name of the program you want to run, like winword (Word) or mstsc (remote desktop client). This works well, but it requires you to remember the exact executable names for each app. Open source app Launchy to the rescue! It makes its own index of your start menu, and once you invoke it using a hot key (I use Win+Space), it works pretty much just like Vista. It even indexes your Control Panel items, just like Vista. No more hunting for those hard-to-find items in the control panel!
Cursors
Vista includes some new cursors. Some people don’t like them, but I think they look pretty snazzy myself. They’re available for XP. You can Google for them, or there are some from an old Vista build at http://www.gurudesign.no/downloads/aero_cursors.zip.
Windows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer 7
They’re both available for Windows XP. ‘Nuff said.
Sidebar
I’m not a big fan of the Vista Sidebar personally, but if you like the concept of having some widgets or gadgets or whatever you want to call them running on your desktop, then you can check out Konfabulator Yahoo Widgets engine. It’s not exactly sidebar, but the widgets it can run is very similar to Vista Sidebar gadgets. Apparently the Google Desktop sidebar also has the capability to run Google gadgets, so that’s another option.
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