Nithin Kamath's Weblog » MS Windows

Make Windows XP desktop look like Gnome

Nithin — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 06:21:01 +0000

Working primarily on Gnu/Linux and just moving to Windows occasionally, I felt a need to make the Windows XP desktop look like Gnome. There are two aspects to this, one is to change the icons and the other is to change the visual styles. Here is a step by step procedure for converting your desktop to Gnome.

Installing Icon Theme

Icons are an essential part of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) world. We will be using Tango Patcher, which currently includes implementations of the Tango icon theme, the Tangerine icon theme developed by the Ubuntu art team, Gnome-Icon-Theme2 and NLD10’s Industrial-Icon-Theme. Download the patcher and installing it just involves running the software.

The Patcher before installing gives you the option of the icon theme you want to install from the various ones mentioned above, I choose the default Tango Icon Theme, you can choose anything else. An option to change you Login Screen and BootUp screen is also available, choose it based on your liking. Then continue with the process, it will install and then reboot your system to be greeted with the new icons.

Installing Clearlooks Visual Styles

The next step is to change the visual styles, we will be using the clearlooks option, available as ClearLooks for Windows XP.

For visual styles to work we would generally need a software such as styleXP, but there exists an alternative to enable external themes support in WindowsXP, download and install Neowin UXTheme Multi-Patcher v4.0 (alternative link for download) (it applies a patch to the UXTheme.dll, to remove this just run the software again).

Next to install the Clearlooks themes head over ClearLooks for Windows XP or directly download by clicking here. Unzip the file and copy the folder to your themes folder, which is usually located at “C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\”.

Now go through your usual procedure which you use to change your Visual Styles (right click on desktop, choose appearance tab) and choose the ‘Clearlooks’ option. and Viola, now we have a desktop which closely resembles the Gnome environment. See a couple of screenshots below.

Hope you found this useful, do let me know your experience by commenting below.

IE 7 | FF 2.0 – Fresh and Necessary!

Nithin — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 03:22:21 +0000

The last fortnight saw major updates to the two main browsers viz., Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, with IE trying to retain its mammoth user base and FF trying to grows its user base. I have not gone through the new features available in IE7, but I must say the improvements over IE6 are huge and you should update to IE7 without rethinking.

I am a FF user and have been using the FF 2.0 from its Release Candidate stage, i.e. FF 2 RC1, and have been blown away by the features improvement in this version. Let me make a quick note of the improvements I liked:

Tab browsing Improvements: The new version has a close button for each of the open tabs, rather than one close button for all the tabs, it makes life much easier while browsing the web. The other major improvement has been ‘Undo Close Tab’, very very useful when you close a tab by mistake and want to get it back.
Session Resuming: The advantage of using tabs is that one can open as many webpages as one wants, but what if you want to close the browser or browser crashes what happens to the open tabs, in FF2, you can now get back all the open tabs.
InLine Spell Checking: A major reason to upgrade from FF1.5 to FF2, the inline spell checking works well and helps in pointing out errors, especially useful for users who type fast and of course for those words which have always confused you.
There are various other features like, a newer slick theme, integration of the addon/theme manager, Phishing protection, and how could I forget the improved RSS/XML feed handling capabilities with an option to add it to any web based reader or a software reader along with preview capabilities.

So people update you browser to its latest version and experience the internet from a whole new perspective, the browser wars are going to hot up even more, considering that FF 2 has had over two million downloads in first 24 hours with a peak rate of over 30 downloads a second, means that MS is going to work harder and try to innovate new features into IE, the future is certainly good. Happy browsing.

Make Your Windows Fast As Never Before!

Nithin — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 02:27:01 +0000

Just found this one while browsing,

The author of the page has focused on the ones which are simple to do and won’t cause problems if you get it wrong, rather than listing registry tweaks etc.
Some of the one’s which have been suggested are:

Improving memory usage

Optimising the pagefile

Running bootvis to improve boot time

Defragmenting the pagefile

and many more…

Read the full article

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I have not tried any of these specifically, so if you do try it out and if it does really help, it would be great, but i feel most of them are the ones that were already mentioned in one place or the other. So good luck if you are trying these out.

Windows XP run on Pentium Overdrive 8 MHz & 20 MB RAM

Nithin — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 17:03:56 +0000

In this article, the author proves that Windows XP can be installed, and ‘run’, on processors with as little as 8MHz. “The target of this project was to find the weakest system where you can run Windows XP. Keep in mind, that Microsoft official requirements are a CPU with 233 MHz an 64 MB of RAM. But that had to be beaten!”

Read full article

The Freeware Publishing Site

Nithin — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 01:01:22 +0000

THE FREEWARE PUBLISHING SITE offers a collection of the best freeware for WINDOWS. The software presented is no shareware or commercial demoware. But real FREEWARE. Every day new Freeware is presented, Check here the NEW link. If you are looking for something special, you can SEARCH this site by keywords.

Visit the site: http://www.freewarepub.org/