BOOT CAMP 511 (12/02/08) – Poor Man’s Vista, part 3
We’ve reached
the concluding part of this short series on transforming your Windows XP
computer into a passable imitation of a Vista PC. I must repeat this is not some
sort of backdoor XP to Vista upgrade; Windows XP is still there beneath the
surface but the utilities we’ve been looking at can give XP a fresh new look
with some of Vista’s best Aero Glass visual features and as we‘ll see in a
moment, help improve functionality with easier desktop navigation and more
advanced search facilities.
We’ll
kick off this final selection with one of Vista’s most eye-catching gimmicks
and that’s 3D Flip. It’s a radical update of the dowdy Task Switcher in Windows
98 and XP (Alt + Tab), which lets you quickly switch between running
applications. The twist in Vista is to turn it into a fancy 3D effect with the
windows ‘flipping’ towards you when you press Winkey + Tab. There are several
commercial programs on the market that do this sort of thing but there’s no
need to spend a penny as a small Japanese utility called WinFlip does an
excellent job, and it’s free! In fact I think WinFlip is actually better than
Vista’s 3D Flip and as an added bonus it uses only modest resources; it can
even be used on Vista PCs that suffer from under-powered graphics and cannot
run Aero Glass 3D Flip in its native form.
There
are lots of extra features, like Mouse Gesture and edge clicking, which invoke
flip mode when you rapidly describe a circle with your mouse pointer or click
on the desktop border. Each 3D window can be tagged with a letter so that
rather than flipping through lots of pages you just type the letter of the window
you want to display; you can also flip windows using the mouse scroll wheel.
Installation is very straightforward; download the ‘zipped’ file (only 423kb),
let XP Extract the program files into a new folder then copy the shortcut icon
into your Startup folder (Start > Programs > Startup), if you want it to
launch automatically with Windows. The controls and options are accessed by
right-clicking the icon that appears in the System Tray, next to the clock.
This
next program also mimics another classic piece of Vista eye candy by displaying
a thumbnail view of icons in the Taskbar. Like WinFlip Visual ToolTip it
has many more configuration options than the Vista offering, including the
facility change the size and shape of the thumbnails. It has another unusual
feature that lets you drag the thumbnails anywhere on the desktop, and they can
be grouped together on a ‘docking bar’ and then rotated to give them a classy
3D look. It’s very clever, but I have to say it’s not as good as Rocket Dock,
which we featured last week in Boot Camp 510. Once again installation should
pose no problems, after the zip file has been downloaded (427kb), XP offers to
extract the files into a folder and to start the program click on the
visualtooltip.exe icon. The control panel, which opens when you right-click the
System Tray icon has all of the configuration settings, and the option to load
the program automatically at boot up.
One
of the most impressive and genuinely useful features in Vista is Search. It is
quite unlike the Search option in previous versions of Windows and much easier
to use. As soon as you start typing something it starts listing possible hits,
gradually refining the list as you complete the keyword or filename. It’s fast,
smart, and really good at sifting through large folders containing hundreds or
even thousands of images, music tracks, emails and documents.
It’s
probably asking too much to find a third-party desktop search engine that
matches the one in Vista, which is so closely integrated into the operating
system, but Copernic
comes pretty close. The key to its speed is the way it continually indexes the
contents of your hard drive, this it does in the background, when the CPU is
idle, so there’s little or no impact on performance. Like the facility in Vista
there are Search boxes all over the place, on the desktop and on browser
toolbars. If it thinks you’ve misspelled a keyword it suggests alternatives, it
keeps tabs on over 150 different file types, from Word documents to MP3 tracks.
Like Vista Search, results are instantly previewed, filtered and sorted, and
the search can be extended from your desktop to the Internet. Unlike some rival
desktop search engines Copernic keeps your data, search results and habits
in-house and private, there’s no calling home to the mothership with your
details and it supports advanced features, like ‘wildcards’ and standard search
operators. The program installs directly from the download (5.4Mb) and straight
away starts cataloguing your hard drive, but only during ‘idle time’, so it can
take a while – depending on the size of your drive and how full it is -- before
it’s fully up to speed.
Next Week – Vista Tuning Tips
JARGON FILTER
AERO GLASS
Collection of visual
enhancements in Windows Vista, designed to make the desktop and programs look
more attractive and easier to use
IDLE TIME
Period of inactivity when
the computer’s CPU is not performing any particularly demanding tasks
ZIPPED
Compressed file, the
amount of data is reduced to make it easier to send over the Internet. Zipped
files have to be decompressed using the built-in Extraction utility in XP and
Vista, or a third-party program, like WinZip
TOP TIP
Some
of the programs and add-ons we’ve been looking at may slow your PC down, so
only install one of them at a time and see how you get on. If you notice a
serious dip in performance check the new program’s configuration settings to
see if there are any adjustments you can make to reduce the demands it makes on
your PC’s CPU and graphics resources. Upgrading your video adaptor or adding
more memory might help in some cases but in the end, if your PC is slow or underpowered
then some of these programs are only going to make things worse.
Don't forget, there's a
full archive of previous Boot Camp Top Tips at www.pctoptips.co.uk
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© R. Maybury 2008, 2301
Part 1 2
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