I had installed Vista ultimate on my PC a Couple of months ago. I worked fine but I really hated it because:
* I was not able to install my Sound card on it.
* I was not able to Install Nero on it.
Everything else was a charm, especially the Windows Aero and 3D flip ( Vista is all about these two things). Everything else was like XP, and XP is also much faster than Vista. So I got rid of Windows Vista. But I really missed the Aero effect.
After a month I figured how to turn my Windows XP in Windows Vista. It looked so much similar to Vista that my brother got confused so did everybody else who saw it. Here are the screenshots:
Here is how you can also turn XP in Vista:
First you need to patch Uxtheme.dll, because the themes won’t work if you have not patched it. Download this patcher which will do it for you and the Restart your PC.
Next thing you need to do is to find a good theme. The one I used in the above screenshots can be downloaded from here. You can find Vista themes here. When you have downloaded the Desired theme, Unzip it and copy it to C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes.
Get a nice Vista wallpaper over here or you can also search for them in google.
Now download the vista sounds and Unzip/Copy the to C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA folder. Goto Windows Control panel >> Sounds, Speech, and Audio Devices >> Sounds and change the sound for respective events.
For the Vista like "Taskbar Screenshot Utility" (I can’t find any other good word for it) download Vista Task Tips and install it. You can resize the screenshot by scrolling the mouse wheel. Now when you hover a open window in Taskbar, it shows you a screenshot of it.
For the Aero Effect I use this. And for 3D flip I use Winplosion.
For Sidebar I use Google sidebar bundled with Google desktop. There are many others and better sidebars for XP than Google sidebar but I like Google’s because it adds functionality to your desktop, and because I use many other services of Google which are integrated with Google Desktop. Other can be downloaded here, here and here
For the start menu I used VistaStart and downloaded some Vista Screensavers from here. I downloaded the Vista cursors and Vista icons.
To make my OS look more like Vista I used the Vista theme for my aVast antivirus software and which can be downloaded here. I also downloaded the Vista theme for Firefox. I changed the color scheme of Office 2007 to black which gives it a Vistaish feel. I also downloaded the Vista Explorer to make my PC more like Vista If you know some any other tweaks, let them come in comments.