So it took me sometime, but i have successfully fully transformed my windows xp appearance and usability to windows 7's appearance!


complete with super efficient real transparent aero that is able to function with out any graphics card support and at incredible speeds, the handy windows 7 taskbar system and start menu.
it even has window snap on and shake abilities!

screenshot:


these are the apps that i used:
-true transparency (the unbelievably efficient program for aero and window snap on)
-ViGlance (windows 7 taskbar system "need a windows 7 shaped xp theme" run: "location of ViGlance" \nosplash to turn off annoying splashscreen)
-ViStart (windows 7 start menu "i use an earlier build of this program because any later versions starts up with an annoying splash screen that can't seem to be removed")
-bootskin (changed the windows xp start up screen/loading screen)
-logon xp (changed the welcome / log in screen)

i hope this comes in handy for some people who can;t get windows 7 running because they own an older computer!

i am able to run this setup with completely no slowdowns.
here are my computer specs:

-HP Pavilion ze2000
-16mb intel graphics accelerator
-1.60GHz Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor (centrino)
-504MB of RAM

this laptop is about at least 6 years old... perhaps older... forgot lol

here is the same thing but with aero on a different setting:
(no blur effect)

I did that too. Here's how I did it:

1) Installed Windows 7.

Yeah, I ended up doing that too.

WhiteValkery, those look very nice, although the titlebar font is not quite right. Can the machine not handle Win7 or something? It seems to me like it would be able to...

if you read my post carefully you will know that i am unable to do so because my computer does not meet the minimum requirements for windows 7...

besides... all i like about windows 7 are the window snapping and the taskbar functions...

thus i have successfully brought all the good stuff of windows 7 to my laptop without any of the annoying windows 7 incompatability with old software since my computer still technically runs windows xp

p.s. my main comp which is a desktop uses windows 7

Sorry, I didn't read carefully enough.

What about Win-Tab? Do you have that? Looks good, although I'm a bit surprised that all the extra graphical goodies didn't bring that 16mb graphics accelerator to its knees.

yeah, i was quite surprised that this computer would be able to handle this amount of fanciness, let alone run it with no slow down or lag at all, or strain the cpu or gpu or both...

the aero program simply allows the windows borders to have png support and constantly updates them. I am not sure how microsoft does their aero... but i do know that with out a high end ish graphics card your aero would be disabled on windows 7 and vista, so now i just think that microsoft is been a bum haha

efficiency is the key as i say a lot lol

EDIT:
oh... i almost forgot to mention!
when you hover you mouse over the large icons on the taskbar, there is also thumbnail support! (amazingly...)

EDIT:
as for win-tab i have seen apps that does it pretty well... but i decided not to add it since i never use it on my real windows 7 anyways... so why add more burden to this old machine if i am not ganna use it?
(i just use the normal old alt tab)

p.s. normally the cpu runs at 0% when its not doing anything, while with these little addons it now runs at about 4% when its not doing anything (hard drive light is not blinking on either)

Yeah, I used to install a program for the Win-Tab thing on my XP machines, but I realized I never used it, and I never used anything other than Alt-Tab now that I'm on 7, so I guess it's more an eyecandy novelty than anything.

yeah...

EDIT: btw.. with all this running the the background i am actually still able to play games like starcraft, GTA san andreas and some steam games with no impact at all

Agreed. Though admittedly, I have a soft spot for Switcher; I played with the settings to make it look like Expose when I hit win+tab. It's actually pretty handy, especially when you have _lots_ of windows open.

Incompatibilities? Interesting. I was under the impression that the majority of XP programs work on Windows 7. Hell, I got the original Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit to work on Windows 7 and I had a hard time getting it to run on my XP PC. Plus, with 7 Ultimate you get WinXP emulation built right in

P.S. I believe you can download and install it from here as well: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

P.S.S. "You must have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate to run Windows XP Mode."

True story, although I generally don't bother with the non-negligable time that thing takes to start. I also have had amazing results from the Vista and XP compatibility modes, including with drivers, which I didn't expect.

its things like starcraft and aoe II that has really weard color bugs running under windows 7 and stuff... not even under compatibility mode (i have windows 7 ultimate)

a lot of other older apps i have tried don't work either... though i can't remember them off the top of my head at the moment... :/

WhiteValkery, do you mean your Starcraft looks like this in the game lobby?

http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=1500.0;attach=2622;image

(sorry, extremly large pic)

There used to be a trick that fixed this problem for odd reasons: leave the screen resolution settings window open then start SC. However, this trick only worked for about a month for me :/

yeah, it looks like that while the water in game and stuff are also screwed up

as for the trick, i never tried it... i wrote a batch file that fixes the problem... but its really a pain to remember to run starcraft from the batch file instead of just double clicking the original icon...

i will post the code of the batch file i wrote here sometime...

Aaah cool. It might be handy.

As for me, it only happens on the title screen and menu, the server select screen, the game lobby and the score screen. In-game, I rarely notice problems unless I press the Start menu key then go back in the game. Otherwise, some parts of the fog of war might look a bit glitchy as well as some parts of the water, but the game remains enjoyable.

yeah, it doesn't affect the gameplay at all... just the visuals a bit...

ahh... i remember some of my most used programs that dont work on windows 7:

Nero and Alcohol !

man... i haven't used them for so long that i almost forgot about them...

p.s. i will post the batch codes here tomorrow

Nero and Alcohol? If those are (as they sound) DVD burning/ripping programs, you should check out the far superior and smaller/lighter-weight ImgBurn/.

Desktop composition is done on the GPU, so the blurring and transparency effects are handled by pixel shaders.

That said, I seem to recall that Windows 7 was supposed to be more efficient than Windows XP, to the point that it ran better and extended battery life on low-end laptops and notebooks. Vista certainly appears to run faster than XP, as it aggressively caches programs and other files in otherwise unused RAM.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Windows 7. Taskbar grouping was awful in previous versions of Windows, and they've elevated it to an even higher level of dreadfulness by making all windows group by default and hiding the window titles. This means that you have to hover the mouse over various icons to identify them, rather than just look at the titles - mystery meat navigation is a terrible sin in user interface design.

Same here, and that's been my experience in trying to run it on outdated hardware.

Yeah, but it takes 20 seconds of menus to disable that (which, by the way, is one of the first things that I did on my systems when I started using Windows 7), which I think is a small price to pay.