Steps to Turn Your XP Machine Into Eye Candy... Oooooo

Follow these Steps to turn Your XP machine into a better looking (more like Tiger) computer. Take these at your own risk. You'll need at least 512MB of RAM (actually you don't need that, but WinXP even says optimal is 512) and 1.5GHz processor to find any of this useful.

1. Download and install Fly A Kite OS-X: Get it from their site. It replaces 30-40 system files including your theme and sound dll's, icons, boot screen, and login screen, so your computer looks and sounds like OS-X. What is nice about Fly A Kite is that it creates a system restore point before it installs; I have not uninstalled it yet but I haven't heard anything bad from the forums.
   
2. Download and install the free version of Stardock's ObjectDock. The full version is $20 and has some cool features like a system tray, tabbed docks, and expanding folders, but it is not needed. (I ran this on Win2K, but it sucks because it crashes every time you try and load the Preferences... so changing any settings requires you to edit the .ini files in your "C:\Documents and Settings\(Your Username)\Local Settings\Application Data\Stardock\" directory (it's hidden)).
   
1. After installing ObjectDock, you might want to play around with the settings and decide if you want to want it to hide the taskbar or dock size, etc. I jsut dragged my taskbar up to the top of my screen and locked the taskbar.
2. The default purple icons are ugly looking to me; however, the icons are .png so you can download better ones. Osx-e.com has a zip of 1000 OS-X Panther icons that you can extract into some location and use those icons for ObjectDock instead.
   **Osx-e.com is also a very good location to find other XP -> OSX utils.
3. ObjectDock supports shortcuts and docklets. Docklets are special shortcuts for things like CPU monitoring, clocks, Recycle Bins, etc.
   
3. Downlaod and install a virtual desktop manager; this is extremely helpful for managing mulltipe windows and applications. I downloaded and tried the MS Windows VDM which works fine for my needs, and it sits in your taskbar (you can define shortcut keys that will switch or tile the desktops in case you hide your taskbar)
4. Download and install Konfabulator. This is a mock of OS-X's Dashboard and appears (aka "Konspose") when you press F8. You can download widgets to add to the Konfabulator like weather, clocks, games, and more.

Well, there are many alternatives to each of these programs. These are just the programs that I chose to use. Osx-e.com has a list of these and other programs/utilities that you can download. There are also other programs that you can dowload and use to make your computer as close to a Mac as you can (in the end, Windows is Windows and nothing more). Check out osx-e.com for more information/troubleshooting.

Here are some screenshots of these in action 1 | 2 | 3 | 4