I never really cared how the UI on my Windows XP machine looked before.  As long as it got the job done, I was happy.  But one day I finally decided that I wanted it to look cool.  So I put on my decorating hat and found some good looking, but useful items to spiff up the ol’ desktop.  All of this was done for free, and most of it was done without hogging up too many resources.

Also, I should get this out of the way now:  SUP DAWG, I HERD YOU LIKE TO CRASH SO WE INSTALLED WINDOWS ON YOUR WINDSHIELD SO YOU CAN BSOD WHILE YOU DRIVE.  Okay, here’s the sources on all the stuff under the hood: 

“Secret” Windows Theme - Royal Noir:  From what I understand, this is a lesser-known official Windows XP theme.  Its a darker theme and its way better than any of the themes that come packaged with Windows.

Launcher - RocketDock:  This is a really nice launcher with smooth animation and transparency blending.  The icons bubble up as your roll your mouse over them.  It can actually be used as a taskbar replacement, because you have the option of minimizing open windows to it like you would on a Mac, but I just use this as a launcher for some of my more commonly used programs.  It has a good community following of users who submit icons and “docklets” to their expanding library.

Desktop Calendar, Task Manager - DeskTask:  This is whats showing my calendar and tasks in clean transparent text on the desktop.  DeskTask is a companion for Microsoft Outlook.  It periodically checks outlook and displays calendar items for the current week on your desktop.  You can control which details it displays and some various display properties.  This is a great tool for the Outlook user.  Outlook is a resource hog, so keeping it open to check your calendar and tasks is something I wanted to avoid.

Font - Calibri:  This is a clean, simple, sans serif font that I think is newly packaged with Windows Vista.  I really like it, and I’m using it on all my programs which allow you to customize fonts.  XP users can get this font by downloading the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Office 2007.  Hat tip to Heather for tweeting about calibri some weeks ago!

Winamp Plugin - ClassicPro:  ClassicPro is a plugin for Winamp users who miss the old days.  Winamp has gotten so bloated with media organizers and extra windows and its own web browswer, who needs all that?  ClassicPro squishes winamp into one neat tabbed window and is supposed to make skinning easy again.  The process for skinning classicpro is just like skinning the old winamp version 2, for those of us who remember that.  I was even able to tweak the font color in my favorite ClassicPro skin in just a matter of seconds.

Winamp Skin - Ebonite for ClassicPro:  This is a very simple black skin.  When you use it with the transparency option, Winamp looks like black glass.  In the screen shot above, I have it set at 80% opacity.  Very nice.