The Object Dock comes already populated with program icons, but they can all be replaced with any preferred set. And the icons have the lovely rendered, three dimensional look of Mac icons.

Once it is positioned on the screen get rid of the ugly Windows task bar by moving it to the top of the screen and setting it to Autohide by right clicking on the Start button, and then click Properties. On the Taskbar tab, select the Auto-hide taskbar check box.

To redisplay the taskbar, point to the area of your screen where the taskbar is located and it will appear.

Much is being made of the new search facility in the yet-to-be-released Mac interface. Why wait? The same thing is already available for Windows XP as the MSN Quick Search Toolbar suite. Download it, install it and drag the icon for the Quick Search toolbar onto the Object Dock. Bingo! One step ahead of Mac already.

Now, emboldened by success so far why not go the whole hog and replace the dreary old Windows GUI completely? One way of doing this is to download DesktopX — a clever application that can change the GUI at the click of a button.

DesktopX gets its screen layouts from pre-packaged theme sets created by geeks and nerds who should get out more. WinCustomize is a good place to start looking for DesktopX themes and widgets [small apps, such as clocks, calculators, games etc]. There are many other sources of themes best found by googling "desktopx themes".

The components of the theme are downloaded in a zip file. Run DesktopX and choose "Create" from the options and then browse to the zip file and stand back. Prepare to be astonished.

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