I love windows and there is no two ways about it. However, I am intrigued by features other OSes (Mac and Linux) offer that Windows doesn't have. In the September'08 issue of PCWorld, we covered 20 ways to add features of Mac and Linux to Windows. I'm going a step further by including a few applications that can add features of the as yet unreleased Windows 7 along with some more applications with which you can add features of Mac and Linux to Windows XPjVista. And don't
forget to tryout my recomŽmendation of useful utilities.

Treasures from Friend and Foes

Mac OS X's application Expose is one of many Mac tools that are well known. It is a well implemented application for switching from one task to another and some other interesting features. Among these, there is an innovative feature, Hot Corner, which can be used to run applications or actions when you your mouse cursor comes in contact with any of the desktop screen's four corners. The aptly named tool Hot Comers does these with perfect elan even though it is a small app.

I actually love the feature in Linux where I can use the Alt key and mouse to drag any window to any location even if they are maximized. This feature can be enabled in Windows with AltOrog which is a tiny application that is focused to do a particular thing and does it really well. You can also use the Shift key to drag windows and stick it to other windows.

From what I have seen of Windows 7, shaking your mouse to minimize any open windows and using your mouse to snap windows to the left/ right side of the screen or maximize it by dragging it to the top of the screen are some of the features that seem interesting. You can achieve these in Windows XPjVista by using two apps AeroShake and AeroSnap. Find all these applications in the Screensavers & Themes section.

A powerful News Aggregator
I have been using Google Reader for managing my newsfeeds and it does its job very well. However I'm really crippled when I want to check updates on sites which don't have feeds to subscribe to. So, Newzie has been a boon to me- apart from the usual task of managing feeds, it also monitors web pages that don't have newsfeeds for updates or for specific changes like particular words, new links or images, etc. But the buck doesn't stop here.

So many features are loaded into this unassuming news aggregator that it is hard to believe that it is free. It includes Bulk Channels for combinine multiple feeds, advanced filtering of news, News Slide shows for easily browsing through all the feeds, Post Sweeper for cleaning out unneeded feeds, Automated Maintenance, Priority Levels for assigning priorities according to importance, and lots more. Find it in the Internet section.

Freeze It and Take Control
This little tool (Yawffer) does the job of monitoring my system unobtrusively. It displays the current time, CPU usage, hard disk data transfer rate, and memory usage as a string of text above any window and can be placed anywhere on the desktop.

The reason why I have a particular interest in this tool is that it also comes with the ability to freeze any process for a while. It is particularly handy when I want to free up some system resources. It even has a feature for checking network connections. Find it in the Utilities section.