Make XP Look (A Little) Like Vista

Topics Windows Vista, Windows XP on August 3rd, 2007

Most people who see Vista for the first time really like the look of the new operating system and some features, like 3D Flip and Thumbnail Preview are an instant hit. However, for old fuddy-duddies, like me, who are waiting for things to settle down before switching their main PCs to Vista, here’s a way to get that Vista feel, but still keep hold of XP.

This tip will give you Vista like Thumbnail previews, which basically means when you hover your mouse over a Taskbar icon you see a thumbnail image of the program or document it represents. All you need is a small freeware program called Visual ToolTip, download and install it and you’re almost there. As it stands the thumbnails it produces are really small, so right-click on the Visual Tool Tip icon in your System Tray, select Options then the Thumbnails tab and increase the size to 50% or larger. You can also improve the look by selecting the Display tab and unchecking the item ‘Show Windows Title’ which gets rid of the large ugly label.