If that won??™t cut it, check out Stardock WindowBlinds (demo at http://
www.stardock.com/). And while there weren??™t any themes that mimicked
Vista Aero Glass exactly at the time of this writing, there were quite a few
Vista-esque themes available from http://www.wincustomize.com/.
But that??™s not all. To get the thumbnail previews that float over taskbar buttons
in Home Basic, check out Visual Task Tips, free from http://www.
visualtasktips.com/.
Figure 5-5. My Expose mimics the Expos?© all-at-once task switcher from Mac OS X
232 | Chapter 5: Performance
Maximize the Windows Performance Rating
With the introduction of the fancy new Glass interface in Vista (covered in
the last section), Microsoft is at last taking display performance seriously in
a non-gaming context.
Enter the Windows Experience Index, a numeric score that supposedly indicates
the baseline performance level of your PC??™s hardware. To view your
PC??™s current score, open the Performance Information and Tools page in
Control Panel (Figure 5-6).
Here, you??™ll see the five performance indexes that Vista calculates:
Processor
This measures your CPU??™s number-crunching prowess; specifically, how
quickly it can compress and decompress data, encryption and decrypt
data, compute a hash, and encode a video stream. For perspective, here
are benchmarks from a handful of Processor scores culled from the
Web.
Figure 5-6. The Windows Experience Index is a performance score based on the weakest
performer in your PC
Make Your Hardware Perform | 233
Performance
Want to raise your Processor score without spending any money? Check
out ???Overclock Your Processor,??? later in this chapter.
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