For me (i.e. `mine'), I cleaned up my PC and did a bit of desktop decoration for 4 days straight.  Ha, silly?  Perhaps, but it costs me nothing except the minimal on house electricity and the broadband.  I am in search of a cheap life style for retirement preparation.  Besides, I was annoyed by my PC's sluggish behavior for the past few months (no, not yet Linux, still XP, even though I like the penguin) and decided to take a look of what's under the hood.  Well, this usually happens after years of installing useless software on your PC, with each one of them setting up several useless background tasks cumulatively.  (The fact: I didn't expect 4 full days as I intended to do a Drupal upgrade here plus some CSS corrections as well, originally...)

Anyway, my desktop now has a summer look:

How to cook this?

1. For the skins/themes, you can choose to pay or not to pay:
• To pay: pick Microsoft Plus! pack and use those grandma (or CEO) themes, OR choose from the more vibrant 3rd party engines which are partly free and partly paid out there.
• For free: patch your XP (not for the faint-hearted as it patches the XP kernel!) so that it can accept unsigned themes, and choose from the millions of free skins out there by the struggling artists worldwide.  Note that you can only choose Visual Styles, which is for the XP out-of-the-box theme engine.  There are many hotspots for free skins, such as customize.org, other than the links listed above, or you can simply google "xp theme" for a treasure hunt.
2. Oh yes, I patched my XP for free of course!  It's an exercise for retirement preparation.
3. For the dashboard at right, I use Sysmetrix with MotherBoard Monitor, and Rainlendar.
4. Icons, get it anywhere.  Just too fragmented memory.
5. Specifically for the XP skin that I chose for this revamp, it's MindWood from the Mindland.  I highly recommend their works as the skins are elegant as well as scoring high on usability.  Note that there are many details in a skin in order to make it work in every windows activity.  Missing some will render a confusing screen (such as missing dividers in the file folder listing, or obscure text because the text color is too close to the background color etc.).  Mindland's skins miss no details and a very pleasant windows experience yielded.  Ok, ok, I've darkened the `inactive-title-bar-text' a bit to make it less "active" looking comparing to the `active-title-bar-text', and that's the only change required.  For the rest, all perfect.  Actually, the swimming dolphins wallpaper is from there also.

Looking back, skinning⁽¹⁾ is not new.  In 2003, that's how my desktop looked like.  I used a different way to make the wallpaper though - with Active Desktop.  Basically, I linked up a few pictures from NASA and collaged on the desktop.  I've changed a few skins in between the years but the wallpaper remained the same.  A few days ago, I found that it was just too dark.  The high contrast between the wallpaper and the content window hurt my eyes.  You have to admit that high contrast is only suitable for the young...

However, XP was not the real surprise which led me to fancy about desktop skins/themes.  It was Gnome on Linux which really surprised me in 1999⁽²⁾, recalling that it was still the Win95 days with gradient title bar being the "best of the breed" invention at that time.  Even the Mac OS 8/9 looked dull in comparison to Gnome.  The screen dump below was run off using the Enlightenment window manager on Gnome desktop from the RedHat distro in 1999.  It is a bit too 3-D gamer look to me nowadays but it did catch my eyes at that time, for the extreme that you could do with your desktop.  So, if you want to feel like running Quake on Emacs while working, you can...

Originally...

What about my PC health besides the beauty treatment?  As usual, just uninstall stuff that you don't need, check up what the hell are for the services from say the Elder Geek (hey, I like this - not all geeks are young...), turn the useless off, and msconfig for further tailoring.  Something different for my case is the Regional and Language Options.  I run English XP with Chinese as the `Language for non-Unicode programs'.  It seems to confuse some background tasks such as Cygwin cygserver.  Some tasks were intermittently dead on startup.  It's too much to be said on the whole PC health check topic and perhaps in my next writing (if Vista doesn't become the hot topic by then rendering all XP discussions obsolete, or perhaps I should write Gnome instead?).

What about the Drupal upgrade and CSS correction here?  Forget about it.  There is always tomorrow.

Till then, I'll enjoy my new desktop while stocks last!

Notes

(1)

Want to be a skinning artist?  Here's a comprehensive primer as well as some more history.

(2)

Reading old mails is always nostalgic, especially those dated 1999 when we saw the uprise of the internet and new platform competitors like BeOS (now dead) and RedHat (going strong, why I didn't think of buying their stock at that time?).  To quote from my original mail to my friends:

...I used the Enlightenment Win Manager for a while (above) before I found an even sexier AfterStep:

The beauty of AfterStep is not only the presentation, but also the intelligence to put things in the most convenient locations, non obstructing, automatically, when using it.  From the name AfterStep, I guess it's made by mimicking the Next Step, the failed business of Steve Jobs.  However, if this was what Step achieved 5 (or 8?) years ago, then I have to admire the vision of Steve...

Actually, for NextStep, more at First prog executed on L4 port of GNU/HURD