Get Vista's Best Features in XP

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If you like some of Windows Vista’s features but you are a die hard Windows XP user, LifeHacker is here to help. This seems like an awful lot of work just to get a few of Vista’s features but, if you don’t want to upgrade to Vista, going this route might be the next best thing.

We're going to focus on Vista's small and large features that are missing from XP, separated into three categories: applications, functional, and aesthetic (e.g., transparency is aesthetic, the new start menu search is functional). This list is not exhaustive, but it does cover the features readers feel make Vista worth it.
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DX10 hack for XP, it works, really. A friend of a cousin's heard that his neighbor's grand ma got it working. :D
 
So in order to continue "Not buying Vista" you are just going to load XP down with features to emulate Vista and end up bogging xp down, thus nullifying the "Vista is bloated" argument which is an inane argument anyhow.

Seriously, Stick with XP and shutup and be happy or upgrade to vista and quit crying about it. Good god.
 
Dekoth said:
So in order to continue "Not buying Vista" you are just going to load XP down with features to emulate Vista and end up bogging xp down, thus nullifying the "Vista is bloated" argument which is an inane argument anyhow.

Seriously, Stick with XP and shutup and be happy or upgrade to vista and quit crying about it. Good god.
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Bingo!
 
If I want the "extras" of Vista I am going to buy Vista, which is what I plan on doing with my current build. XP is great, no reason to emulate Vista.
 
Well, you can't get the increased performance, stability and security of Vista by hacking XP.. Not all the eye candy either like the chrome on window borders (though the latest Windowblinds apparently emulates the blur).
 
XP is stable. XP is fast and maybe in the security dept it is weaker. I have both but my preferance is XP.
 
Darn caught my mistake. Darn edit button. LOL. Anyway I likey XP better!
 
I don't know, i hooked up my WD 80GB external driver, installed eBoostr (per that webpage's recommendation) and XP is absolutely SCREAMING fast.
 
The more I use Vista the more I come to despise it, and this is why.

You can make XP do the same tricks for free, there is nothing revolutionary about Vista. DX10 makes almost no difference in the vast majority of games either.

Make it worth my while MS, by this I mean WinFS and all the other goodies that got stripped out of Vista by the end. Windows 7 should hopefully be what Vista should have been, maybe Ill get that. Until then XP for life!
 
the DX 10 hack would be nice. the hacks on that site look like more effort then they are worth. I will wait till they have bugs out then upgrade
 
As much as people love to bash Mocrosoft; where would the world be without them? Every day millions of people take them for granted.

I like Vista. Does it have problems? Yes. Are they earth shattering? No.
We should be grateful that Xp lasted so long and the support for it has been extended. I too looked forward to the new WINFS, but alas they did not relesase it because... who knows maybe it was not ready.

If MS doesn't release new software every now and again then they cannot make money (duh) and their stock goes down (duh) and lots of people loose their shirt and/or their job. So buy Vista Already and be done with it. ($89 for home premium on eBAY) :)

Like many posters have said; why add all this crap to xp? It is just bogging it down.
 
whats funny is most that stuff, I dont want.
the only thing I liked about Vista that XP didn't have was the gadget bar. Yahoo gadgets downloaded, solved.
 
I've had far, far fewer issues w/Vista than I had with XP, and I'm hard-pressed to remember my last BSoD whereas BSoD's were a not so uncommon occurrence under XP- for me, Vista has just kept getting better and better as third party support of it has improved. Not to mention, on my machine Vista runs faster/smoother (despite generally using more RAM and cpu constantly) than did XP, though I am running Vista x64 whereas I had been running XP Pro before.
 
Dekoth said:
So in order to continue "Not buying Vista" you are just going to load XP down with features to emulate Vista and end up bogging xp down, thus nullifying the "Vista is bloated" argument which is an inane argument anyhow.

Seriously, Stick with XP and shutup and be happy or upgrade to vista and quit crying about it. Good god.
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I pretty much agree.

However, many pc enthusiasts such as ourselves have hardware that can handle a bloated out XP, just as well as handling vista.

The choice to do so could be because of the OS cost (semi weak reason), or some sort of incompatibility issue with applications. In those cases the user is at the mercy of said applications' vendor until it is made compatible

At home I dual boot, and have xp 32bit and vista 64 bit both installed. Mostly use the XP because the performace is faster and nothing really earth shattering (yet anyway) from Vista. Dx 10 and 10.1 are only barely starting to show some eye candy improvements in games. Why isnt a 64 bit operating system leaps and bounds faster on my dual core 64 bit processor than Xp 32bit? This is one of the things that would have made Vista a true upgrade. But I'm just not seeing it. (amd 4400+ x2 1mb cache per core, 4gb ram)

At work I run Vista 64 (SP1), and have a VM with xp 32bit loaded. (6000+ x2, 4gb ram) Works fine. I like it. But it has quirks that slow things down. The ocassional explorer bug where the green progess bar just goes and goes.... The bug with mapping and unmapping drives, certain apps will show old server\share info from re-used drive letters... it can get annoying. At least IE7 has stabilized and doesn't crash nearly as much as it used to.

One thing to point out when people say "OMGz XP is like 7 years old!1!" Is that this really isn't true. XPSP2 WOULD have been a new OS release, but Microsft had been getting raked over the coals for the security issues in XP, and people were tired of Upgrading the Operating System (PAYING) to fix fricken nasty security holes. So it was released free as a service pack (August 2004). In essence, XP is approaching 4 years old. [Pretty much all microsoft products are built upon the codebases for their previous versions. So any counter argument on it's age is pointless because there is code still present dating back to windows 1 and even DOS, 1985, in Vista]
 
Monkey God said:
whats funny is most that stuff, I dont want.
the only thing I liked about Vista that XP didn't have was the gadget bar. Yahoo gadgets downloaded, solved.
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Google has a free gadget bar too.

Where's the hack to make Vista behave just like XP?
 
milkweg said:
Google has a free gadget bar too.

Where's the hack to make Vista behave just like XP?
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I can't find a way to do that but I'm going to admit.. it's the best thing I have yet to hear lol !

I tried a conversion pack once and it looked completely like vista with no bog, I can't recall what the name was.. but the icon looked like a retail box of vista if that helps.
 
milkweg said:
Google has a free gadget bar too.

Where's the hack to make Vista behave just like XP?
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Why would you want one? Unless you bought your system with Vista installed, you most likely have a copy XP. I don't remember the last time I have heard Windows 2000, or 98
 
I am so sick of the whole "bloated OS" argument. Why don't we all go back to Win98?
 
meh... i ended up getting 4GB of ram, so i just upgraded to vista, ive encountered a few errors but i guess those can be linked to my ram
 
vengence said:
Why don't we go back to DOS? That uses very VERY little overhead.
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I know several people that use Novell. if it works it works. and 32 bit dos programs ran pretty good provided the programing was done right. Of course now we can do 10 as much with a less development time. in the end I think its a good trade, high over head with higher productivity. I do think that Microsoft gets carried away though.
 
risqu3 said:
meh... i ended up getting 4GB of ram, so i just upgraded to vista, ive encountered a few errors but i guess those can be linked to my ram
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You're running Vista x86? I'm running w/4GB of RAM (on an Asus A8N-SLI nForce 4 Mobo nonetheless which apparently are notorious for having problems with 4GB of RAM in Windows XP) in Vista x64 and am not having any issues at all (though I have an upgrade version of Vista and when I reformatted and had XP installed for a bit I was trying to reacquaint myself with XP a bit and it was just crashing like crazy despite my having the latest mobo drivers and everything installed).
 
TerranUp16 said:
I'm running w/4GB of RAM (on an Asus A8N-SLI nForce 4 Mobo nonetheless which apparently are notorious for having problems with 4GB of RAM in Windows XP
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That was the first motherboard I used when I went to AMD 64. I've never had a problem with 4gb ram under xp on there. I was using double sided 1gb coursair chips. ddr-400.

What are you using ?
 
FFS don't go around telling people Vista is more secure. It is only as good as you make it. Hell, I wouldn't have a job if either of those OS's functioned properly. Thats like saying a Volvo is safe. No car is safe if an idiot is driving it.

Click here to install some software you don't know shit about. No thanks. :rolleyes:
 
Reasons to upgrade to Vista extend past a few of it's desktop featuers.

If you want to mimic the functionality of Vista while staying on XP thats fine I guess, but installing many seperate 3rd party applications is probably just going to lead to trouble with compatability, security and stability.

People need to revise their reasons for not upgrading to Vista, it has to happen sometime because XP is not always going to be supported by microsoft and developers, and in all fairness theres a lot of us in the rest of the world who aren't going to wait around for those trailing behind technology.
 
What's the big deal with using a new OS like Vista? This one screams "Smug! Alert".

150px-1002itsahybrid.jpg


Now that I've installed Vista, I'm gonna get cutting edge technology like energy saving air conditioners, refrigerators with 10 different compartments, hybrid cars, the latest feature-packed Nokia handphone, the latest incarnation of the Trapper Keeper 2000...No wait. I'm not going to.
 
When I run out of games that can be fully experienced in XP, I'll think about Vista. For other functionality, I have no problems with XP 64-bit. I just have no reason to move to Vista right now, nor do I have any reason to install a lot of crap on XP. In fact I've spent some time stripping the existing crap from my current installation. I get no BSODs (except whilst I was tweaking my hardware config after installation) and all my hardware is supported. If it ain't broke etc. There is no reason for me to change my current config. I only moved to XP (from ME) to play Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst (it required a level of Japanese language support unavailable in ME), and I now have far, far too many games to need to do something similar again in the near future.
 
Breach said:
The more I use Vista the more I come to despise it...
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I have Vista on a laptop. I run Vista in Windows Classic mode on and it's tolerable now. Even after you turn off or disable all of the Vista glitter and garbage, you're left with a clunky version of XP.
 
KillaChaos said:
Why would you want one? Unless you bought your system with Vista installed, you most likely have a copy XP. I don't remember the last time I have heard Windows 2000, or 98
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I was being tongue-in-cheek, and yes, I have two copies of XP, Pro and Home. I did read once that there is a hack out there that can make Vista behave just like XP though but I see no point in doing that as the benefit of Vista is better security so I don't want to reverse those changes.
 
Chombo said:
I am so sick of the whole "bloated OS" argument. Why don't we all go back to Win98?
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I do have WinME installed on a 3rd PC. It is not plugged into the internet and used purely to play older games and for any files I want to keep secure off-line.
 
Chombo said:
I am so sick of the whole "bloated OS" argument. Why don't we all go back to Win98?
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Actually, I would prefer the step back to Win2k. It was much more resource light than XP with practically the same functionality in many cases. Also, since XP32 was built off the 2k codebase, there really shouldn't be many differences between them for the most part.

XP was basically Win2k with some changes and tweaks. XP brought practically nothing which could have been put into 2k. There were two main reasons this wasn't done. 2k was meant to be a business OS but its popularity with even home users was a lot higher than MS expected. XP gave MS another way to increase sales and money so they made some changes and aimed it more towards the home user with the Home version and continued with the Pro version for business use. XP Pro isn't much different from Home except for the ability to join a domain as well as some tools very few home users would ever make use of.

 
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