Quest for a nicer desktop I

I may not be crazy for Macs, but I am not delusional. I do find MacOS X's desktop very refine and neat. Last week I set off to make my XP desktop just as nice. High quality oversized desktop icons? Checked. A kick ass wallpaper? Checked. Aqua buttons and controls? I'll pass, I prefer XP's.

But it's still not as nice.

Do I really have to move to Vista? This week at work I have to install Vista on one of my desktops for testing purpose. The machine is capable of supporting dashboard widgets but Aero is out of the question for that on board video card. Vista black desktop is nice, it's comparable to the Macs, but I wouldn't run it on my main systems (that'd be another story). My home desktop and laptop remain XP.

So I looked closer, I realized my user interface was missing some of the more refine details on the Mac, like shadows and transparency.

A shaodw is clearly visible underneath a transparent menu

Oh, I can do that. Few people realize but these two elements have been supported in Windows since Windows 2000. For example, the mouse cusor has been casting a fuzzy shadow since Windows 2000, so do the menus since XP.

What do you know, turns out Windows have shadows too

If I can just make my window cast a shadow too, hmm...