Nikhil Dev

Of late I have been seeing a lot of my colleagues working on their macs and I wanted to have all those visual bling as well. But unfortunately I cannot afford a Mac as it is almost 2.5 times my Windows laptop price. So what could I do? Well, I have tried things a lot over a couple of years to get that perfect looking mac like desktop and this one that I have been trying since the last 2 days has come the closest.

First: We need to sking all the Windows and title bars, scrollbar and all the filthy look that Microsoft has put into Xp. For that I used Style Xp as I found this one to run the smoothest without crashes unlike Talisman or Aston or Window blinds. A free copy of Style Xp can be downloaded from the TGT Soft website.

Once you have downloaded and installed Style Xp, use the Panther theme which is the one that the applications prompts to be set as the default. Once you have done that, change all the icons to iCandy style and add all the bling that you want from the Style Xp customization screen.

Now that we have done with the basic window skinning, its time to add that best feature of Mac which is the Dock at the bottom of the screen. The best software that allows you to do this is Object Dock made my StarDock applications. A freeware version of Object Dock can be downloaded from the main StarDock website for free.

Once you have installed that, you have a highly customized and lite on the memory dock which you can place anywhere on the screen.

Next just get rid of the quick launch toolbar by right clicking on taskbar and checking off Quick Launch from the toolbars section. I still went even more ahead and set all the system tray icons to be hidden always. Also I hid my Desktop icons.

Voila! we have a really neat interface that is highly customizable and for sure increases the accessibility of programs on your computer. click on the thumbnail at the top of post see what my desktop looks like.

Please do comment and let me know whether this was helpful for you.

P.S: Something else that I would suggest for you people would be to install Launchy which is also freely downloadable. This is the best application launcher till date that I have seen and I use it with the Quicksilver skin which adds that Mac like theme to Launchy.

Go ahead, try it and let me know what you feel about all these.

Another piece of info is that all this might cost you about 30mb of memory footprint in total which i think is quite ok for a modern day computer.