Win 9x Tricks: Powerful Features Without the Upgrade

What's so good about Windows XP? The stability and reliability it brings to Windows 9x and Me machines that crash regularly. If you want the best that XP has to offer, there's no alternative to buying the OS and, if necessary, upgrading your hardware. But that doesn't mean your old 9 x PC can't learn any new tricks. These tips will give you some of the upgrade effect, without the upgrade price.

Cosmetics The premier desktop theme utility is Desktop Architect, a fabulous piece of freeware that transforms your desktop icons, pointers, colors, and wallpaper with ease, although it can't change title bars or the taskbar. If you'd like to try for a quasi-XP look, locate a free XP theme from a theme site, such as the Theme Doctor.

Browsing You can get Internet Explorer 6, which comes with Windows XP, as a free download from Microsoft. This browser gives you some control over your private information, and it features automatic image resizing, a floating image toolbar, and a media bar for playing music and video files from within the browser. IE 6 has the colorful new XP icons, too, so you'll be browsing in the latest fashion. More important, it's free.

Multimedia Unlike Internet Explorer 6, the new Windows Media Player 8 works only with Windows XP--but don't despair. The earlier Windows Media Player 7.x has many of version 8's best features. It lets you apply different skins, manage your digital audio and video files, rip CDs to your hard disk (though not in MP3 format), listen to Internet radio stations, transfer audio files to portable devices, and burn audio CDs. And yes, it's free. If you don't like Windows Media Player, try a third-party media player, such as RealOne or MusicMatch.

Frequently Used Apps Besides having obvious visual differences, the new XP Start menu can track up to 30 of your most frequently used applications and put them on the left side of the Start menu for easy access (see " Rework Your Frequent Apps List," above). Though previous Windows versions lack this feature, you can achieve the same effect--and more--with ANsoft's $20 RunIt shareware utility. RunIt's pop-up menus display up to 50 of your most frequently or recently used applications on each menu. Or have your system display a Favorites menu that shows the programs or documents of your choice. RunIt does not alter the Start menu, but you can launch its menus--and a more sophisticated version of the Windows Run dialog box--from an icon in the taskbar tray (the area near the clock), via a keyboard shortcut, or with a tiny floating toolbar (see FIGURE 4). You can download a trial version of RunIt from PCWorld.com's Downloads library.

Photo Opportunities Windows XP's highly touted photo-editing tools still rely on the venerable Paint program. If you'd prefer something full-featured, try a third-party program such as Ulead's Photo Explorer 6 freeware for managing and editing photos, which has several tools that XP doesn't.

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