Make Windows Vista look and act like Windows 7

We are on the eve of the general release of Windows 7; however, many of you are just getting used to Windows Vista, or have just bought new machines with Vista installed.  If you got the upgrade coupon with your purchase you are looking a formatting and reloading your OS to get the new operating system, which is a lot of work.

The good news is that Vista is really very similar to Windows 7 in many ways, and you can make some changes to your operating system to give you a similar look and feel.

To start with Windows 7 has a look that mimics Mac OS X is many ways, and you can get that look in Vista with a few downloads and tweaks.  One of the most recognizable features of Mac OS X is the “dock” that you use to launch applications and to see what applications are already open.  RocketDock is a free download that gives Windows Vista a very similar dock.  RocketDock also works in Windows XP, as well as Windows 2000, but in Windows Vista you actually can preview the running applications by simply running your mouse over the dock.

Now there are a lot of sites that offer “skins” for Windows to make it look different, but these are often complicated to install, and there are some sites that provide untested (read dangerous) products.  Tom Merritt of CNET recommends “Windows 7 Style” by giannisgx89 available at Deviantart.com.  In order to use the skin, you must first alter your system files to accept the skin, and the software to do that is called Vistaglazz 1.3, available at download.com. 

Now personally, I think Vista’s interface is pretty good on its own, but there are some features in Windows 7 that I feel are worth adding to Vista.  One of these features is Aero Snap, and Aero Shake.  There are programs for Vista that duplicate these features.  Aero Shake lets you click on the window you are using and literally shake it.  When you do all the other windows minimize automatically.  You can download Aero Shake v1.3 here. 

Aero Snap is a feature that lets you drag a window to one side of your screen and it will resize itself to take that side of the screen automatically.  This is great when you have two documents you want to compare to each other, or if you want copy and paste from one to the other.  You just drag one document to one side, and the other to the other side.  Aero Snap can be downloaded here, the site is in German, but if you click on the British flag on the upper left, it sudden converts to English.

Lastly, I should never recommend lowering your security level, but if you want Windows Vista or Windows 7 to run anything anywhere without any issues, turn off that darned UAC (User Account Control).

I stole most of this article from Tom Merritts video on CNET TV, which is a site I highly recommend if you want to know anything about anything geeky (TV, Phones, Computers, anything!).

~Steve