I’ve been catching up on unread items on my feed reader and I probably have skipped this item from ComputerWorld (undoubtedly one of my favorite reads for tech stuff).

I am now a Vista user and I’m still contemplating hard on whether I’d upgrade to XP or just . I’m even using Home Basic and running it on a fairly okay machine. However, I just know that given my notebook’s specs, it’d blow my mind away if I run XP on it. A great many of my friends and acquaintances, however, have not made the jump to Vista at all. Likewise, I wouldn’t have made the jump if this lappie never came with it.

In any case, ComputerWorld has come up with a great article on how to enjoy XP for the next seven years! It would be just right until Microsoft finally ends all support for Windows XP. And if you might be experiencing “Vista envy” this article provides great tips on how to get Vista’s goodies in XP.

Some takes from the article:

Security

  • Get anti-spyware like Ad-aware and Spybot Search and Destroy to compensate for Windows Defender
  • Get Comodo for outbound protection like Windows Firewall for Vista
  • Get hardware-based encryption like PC Key
  • Get a third-party parental control software
  • In any case, you won’t get User Access Control (that annoying allow-or-cancel prompt) in XP but you won’t miss it anyway

Visuals

The article also puts in a lot of other stuff on maintenance and tweaking but I’d stop with the ones above. Besides, after a couple of months on Vista, I’m not really impressed with the whole thing. And with those tweaks above, I’m pretty sure you’d be getting more or less the same experience.

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