Replacement desktop systems on XP?

April 16, 2004 8:46 AM

The current MeFi thread on Sphere reminded me... Does anyone use a replacement desktop system on XP? Which one and why did you choose to use it?

This thread, btw. Why didn't AxMe allow urls in the question?

posted by twine42 to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I use tsDesk, because it lets me do this.
posted by Jairus at 9:03 AM on April 16, 2004

I was a long-time user of GeoShell. It rocks: very small, very stable, very minimal.

I've since gone back to the XP shell, but added ObjectDock, an idea stolen from Apple. It rocks.

Every once in a while, though, I think about going back to GeoShell. It was so minimalist. I liked that.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:13 AM on April 16, 2004

I'm a fan of Litestep. There are hundreds of themes (including far too many crappy anime ones), so it may take you a while to find one that suits your workflow, but with a little bit of tweaking it's a beautiful thing. Winamp integrated into the taskbar (or the desktop), multiple desktops, command line, modular everything.
posted by Aaorn at 10:08 AM on April 16, 2004

I use Windows 2000's Active Desktop (it was avilable in 98, but was fairly unstable).

I have a html document as my desktop with links to important network resources, web sites, a google search form, etc. I use iframes to display commonly used folders, so I can still interact with files and folders in the traditional way.
posted by o2b at 11:12 AM on April 16, 2004

Jairus, do you have a link for tsDesk? I'm having trouble parsing the Google results.
posted by signal at 11:31 AM on April 16, 2004

I also use ObjectDock.
posted by rushmc at 12:10 PM on April 16, 2004

signal: tsDesk
posted by cmonkey at 12:32 PM on April 16, 2004

www.aston.com is real cool, but I realized that replacing the whole explorer.exe was a bit drastic and then went with DesktopX which sits ontop of explorer and lets you do alot of cool custon stuff. But in the end I figured all I really wanted was a cool wallpaper and virtual desktops... So I went to www.deviantart.com and loaded Nvidia's desktop managment software.
posted by dirtylittlemonkey at 12:48 PM on April 16, 2004

not a full system replacement, but JS pager and cygwin get's me close enough to unix to stay sane.
posted by andrew cooke at 4:57 PM on April 16, 2004