Chicago Sun-Times: Stardock lets you pimp out your PC desktop

Hatred is a cheap, primitive, wasted emotion, but when it comes to working with a computer on a daily basis . . . well, it certainly works.

But please, be precise with your hatred. You don't really hate Windows. You just wish that certain specific bits of it made more sense, or were more useful -- or didn't look like they were put together with Legos.

Even if you're a true-blue XP diehard, you don't really hate the Mac OS or Linux, do you? Surely Apple has had some ideas you enjoy?

I thought so.

If you troll shareware and freeware archives, you'll find loads of little utilities for altering the appearance and functions of Windows. These apps allow you to inflict changes ranging from subtle tweaks to full-court presses that encourage comparisons to what happens to a 1988 Plymouth Reliant on "Pimp My Ride."

In this particular category, Stardock is the king of the pimped-out Windows XP. If you head over to www.stardock.com you'll encounter more than a dozen cheap individual enhancements, most of which can be purchased in a $49 bulk-pack called "Object Desktop." Its components run the full gamut:

WindowBlinds is the simplest, most direct and most obvious enhancement. It allows you to customize the appearance of Windows' standard windows and the startbar, ranging from the effective (the clean, efficient appearance of a Linux windows manager), the traitorous (a perfect interpretation of the Mac window style) to the downright punitive (a tribute to "American Idol"). Dozens come with the package, and hundreds are available via download.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with making XP look pretty (unless you actually want Clay Aiken's head as every window's close box; that's just weird).

The real meat of this package is its many performance tweaks. Virtual Desktops is a feature familiar to Linux users and envied by Mac folks. As it is, all of your apps' windows are jumbled together on one desktop, and the only way to manage several tasks simultaneously is to buy the same sort of video screen that Mick Jagger bought for the Rolling Stones' touring stage.

With Virtual Desktops, I have one desktop containing just the word-processing and Firefox windows I'm using to write this column. When I want to work on some personal business, I can hotkey over to a different desktop that just contains my mail app's windows, my appointment calendar and my address book.

Another desktop contains Photoshop and the other windows that help me wrangle 2000 vacation photos into something manageable.

All by itself, Virtual Desktops reduces the annoyance factor of any given workday by at least 30 percent.

Copying a file into a folder that's inside a folder that's inside a folder (etcetera) is a colossal pain: You have to uncover the final destination folder before you can drag something in there.

SpringFolders kneecaps this annoyance by causing each folder to spring open when the item you're dragging hovers above it. When you've drilled all the way down to the destination folder and released the mouse button, the file drops in and all those sub-sub-folders snap shut behind it.

If you're no fan of the Start menu and the taskbar, Object Desktop feels your pain. RightClick sticks most of the Start bar's functions underneath your right-hand mouse button. It's a handy add-on, but it just slaps at the problem. With ObjectBar, you can do anything from simply making the old thing work better to replacing it entirely, with a floating pallet, a docklike well . . . holy cats, it can even turn the Start bar into a flawless knockoff of the Mac menu bar, even incorporating application-specific menus.

(If you are a closeted Mac fetishist, you'll want to know about ObjectDock, an app that brings the Mac's frabjously useful System Dock to Windows XP. It's not part of Object Desktop, but it's a free download from Stardock.com)

Then there's DesktopX, which defies easy explanation. Where Object Desktop's other utilities feel like simple tweaks and enhancements for XP, DesktopX feels more like retribution for XP's past slights, sins and injuries. With it, you can create a whole new environment that in style and function has no intersection whatsoever with anything created in Redmond, Wash.

The icing on the cake is that nearly all of Object Desktop's enhancements are themselves customizable. Its components have been around for ages, and dozens of sites offer hundreds of custom skins, settings and palettes.

Needless to say, I've become a big fan of Object Desktop. Its functions are based on a lot of rules-busting code, and as such, not all apps will play nicely with it. All the same, it's a terrific value and well worth the minor risks.

Over the course of one week I managed to tweak away most of what I find annoying about XP.

There's not a whole lot of competition in the "Most Exciting Windows Utility" pageant, but rest assured that Stardock walks down that runway in tiara and tears.