Tweaking Windows for Fun and Profit

Actually, there is not a lot of profit involved here, but I've been having fun tweaking Windows to make its appearance suit me better. Part of it has been making Windows look and feel a little more like OSX, and part of it has just been some other tweaks that have nothing to do with OSX.

The first little annoyance that I wanted to address was the Windows command line window. Sure, it gets the job done, but it's kind of ugly. For example, you can't do critically important things like make the background transparent. So after a little digging, I found a nice little open source program called Console. It sports features like making the console background transparent, using an image for the background, and a myriad of other little doo-dads. Lovely.

Next, the minimalist in me wondered if there was some way to get rid of the icons on the Windows desktop that I never use. I don't just mean some of them I mean all of them! I want a pristine desktop with no clutter to obscure my calming, serene natural desktop. Once again, Google proves me to be my one, true friend as it leads me to a simple registry hack. Note, however, that I found this page led me to the appropriate registry key, but unless I'm reading it wrong, they say to set the value to zero to disable the icons. I found that it was already set to 0 and I had to set it to 1.

Speaking of Google, this is a little off-topic, but if you are a Firefox user I highly recommend the Google Preview plugin. Basically it adds a thumbnail picture of the web page for each search result. Nice.

OK, let's go for a little bit more Mac look and feel. How about ditching the task bar and replacing it with something like the dock on OSX? No problem. Note that there is a free version as well as a "plus" version that gives you a few extra features.

Well, it's looking better, but it's still not quite right. Still has that ugly Windows look and feel even though the taskbar is gone. I remember a utility I used in the past, called Windowblinds. I hadn't used it recently, and had stopped using it in the past because it seemed to really degrade my system performance. But I decide to give it another whirl, and wouldn't you know it, it comes pre-packaged with a theme called "iSkin". Wow ... my windows look just like they are running under OSX now! It also doesn't seem to have any notable impact on the responsiveness of Windows, so either I have better hardware than I used to or they have really made improvements to its efficiency. Also, I no longer need to run WinRoll, because most of its functionality is already supported by Windowblinds.

We're almost there, but Trillian just doesn't look right. Fortunately, Google comes to the rescue again and I'm able to unearth an iChat skin. Now Trillian looks a lot more like iChat under OSX. Not completely though. It doesn't really support the cutesy little "speech bubbles" that show up under iChat. It tries to imitate them kinda-sorta-but-not-really. (Sorry-- I try to avoid throwing around technical jargon like "kinda-sort-but-not-really" but sometimes you have to use such terms in order to communicate your points more clearly).

I'm pretty happy with the look and feel now. The only thing kind of missing is the "Finder bar" but that doesn't bother me in the least. In fact that's probably the one thing about OSX I don't really care for. The only other thing I'm not sure about is the system tray. ObjectDock supports it but the icons show up just as big as all the other icons and it loses a lot of elegance. I also found a docklet which solves that problem by displaying all the system tray icons within the space of a normal dock icon. Unfortunately, it seems to be causing system instability for some reason.

Overall I think my desktop looks much better. The only problem is, I was up late last night doing all this. I really needed one of these to help me get up this morning.