Give Windows XP a boost with Windows 7-style features

Launch a web browser and go to the Viglance home page. When the site loads, click the black Download button (being careful to pick the correct one, as the site is peppered with download links for other programs). If the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click Save and choose a location for the downloaded file. Firefox users should select Save File to save the download to Firefox’s default download folder. Now find the downloaded file, right-click it, choose Extract All then follow the Extraction Wizard’s prompts to install the program. When finished, double-click the Viglance icon on the Windows Desktop to launch the program.

First, launch a few applications; this will let you try out the thumbnail feature. Here we have launched a web browser, Windows Explorer, a graphics program and three Word documents and then minimised all of them. When we hover the mouse pointer over the Word icon in the Taskbar at the bottom, three semi-transparent thumbnails appear above – these are ‘live’ previews of the relevant Word windows. To switch to a different window, click on its thumbnail. These thumbnails are especially useful when you have multiple documents open in the same program because they make it easier to distinguish between them.

Viglance also puts an icon in the Notification Area at the bottom right of the screen. Right-click on it and choose Options. To have Viglance start with Windows, tick that box and, while here, tick the Enable Start button box. Click OK. Now move the pointer down to the Start button to see the new Windows 7-style version in place there. Finally, do you have a running program that you use a lot? Right-click on its icon in the Taskbar and choose Pin. From now on its icon will appear on the Taskbar and you can launch it from there, just as Windows 7 users can do.