As I Xi It v2.3

I was getting bored of the stock visual styles that came with Windows XP on my netbook so I had a Google for some other ones and came across Royale Noir which was suppose to be for Windows XP Media Edition, it looked quite good so I thought I’d give it a whirl. The wallpaper (Spectrum of the Sky) complements the colour scheme quite nicely and its all pretty easy on the eyes. The Rocketdock skin at the bottom I dug up from here.

The whole desktop seems to match the blueness of my Aspire One. A happy coincidence really, all I wanted was something different from the run-of-the-mill XP desktop.

I’ve been looking through Lifehacker and came across their Windows Desktop Show and Tell article showing some pretty cool looking desktops. They all looked so minimalistic, cool and kinda Mac like. I thought to myself, “I want that” so off I went in search of some icon docking application things.

I tested out two – ObjectDock and RocketDock.

ObjectDock has more bells and whistles than RocketDock. It also needs a minimum of 256MB of RAM to run and 20MB hard drive space whilst RocketDock only needs 10MB and the installation file is 6.20MB. Both of them are visually aesthetic but I opted for RocketDock in the end since it was the lighter weight application.

If you thought a skinned Windows toolbar was cool, this is even cooler!! I’ve shifted my XP toolbar to the top with autohide on. The icon dock sits on the bottom and I’ve autohid that too for more screen real estate. It just pops up when required. Most of the icons on my desktop are gone, all that’s left is My Documents, My Computer, Recycle Bin, My Bluetooth Places and an application I’ve just downloaded. I’m just wondering how to hide them.