Windows XP Productivity

Do you know how to make a slightly more than a year old Dell Inspiron 1501 run really well? Wipe Vista off the hard drive and install XP! No, I'm not a Vista hater at all. We're running Vista on several desktops at work including my own. Since we're an ISP, it's helpful to have testbeds similar to our customers and many are buying new machines pre-loaded with Vista and it runs great if you have enough hardware.

Like several of the articles that I've seen lately, Microsoft just underestimated the required hardware for a satisfactory Vista experience. A gig of ram and an AMD Turion just didn't cut it on my Dell laptop IMHO. XP has brought new life to this machine.

I've been through periods where I used third party software to completely change the look and feel of XP but my current install is only slightly tweaked for speed with a few apps added for productivity. I'm running Google Desktop complete with sidebar with the requisite weather gadget, notepad gadget, and Google Desktop Search. Although I've read reports to the contrary, Google's search product seems to be less resource needy than Windows Search 4.0. Google's product indexes and searches your email, browsing history, etc. and works very well.

I take advantage of XP's Quick Launch bar with shortcuts to my most abused software including Firefox and Thunderbird. TweakUI has been used to tweak the desktop slightly. I use a free replacement for Windows Explorer entitled xplorer2 Lite. If you find the Microsoft product lacking while you're moving and copying files between drives on your own home network then I heartily recommend it. Sure can't beat the price. I found out about it on Lifehacker.com, a great resource for new and mostly free software to enhance your workflow.

For the eye candy, I change my wallpaper almost weekly and have procured an interesting collection from the net. Ironically enough, most are Hamad Darwish's contributions for Vista but some I've found on deviantart.com and other sites. Check them out!