It's a long story, but it's kinda necessary for you to understand my problem. I had my computer gorgeously customized, it was a mixture of stuff that finally made my very own and personal OS. It had a msstyle, Tiger OS with blue buttons. Aston Desktop, my set of plugins which I already miss -TaskKill, Ghost and Notepad being the MOST important- background, cursors, dock icons etc custom made by myself [most] and some by friends. Unfortunatedly, my laptop died a month ago, and last week I bought a replacement. My old laptop was packed with the almighty Windows XP, not this piece of Vista crap. Aston won't run well, keyboard is unresponsive, tried to uxpatch myself and had to make a system restore... in short, Vista is making my life painful. But can't format and install XP bc I'm in school and have NO time to do this. So far I HAD to get [bc I still prefer my Aston dock] RocketDock which lacks customization but oh well, it kinda works. But I still can't get a msstyle [no, I WON'T use Windows Blinds or any resource hog] and I can't find apps that will replace my functionality, so if anyone knows a program that can replace this, I'd be AMAZINGLY thankful:

Ghost: sits in the systray, click on it, list of open windows, set transparency or always on top.
Notepad: it's in the dock [left side of the screen] and with a mouseover, it slides a notepad with 5 tabs. You make a note, get your mouse away, and the notepad hides. It's already saved. I NEED THIS VERY VERY BAD [was kinda hoping there was a docklet for RocketDock but no]
Taskkill: Another icon next to the clock, click on it, list of open processes and windoes, click to kill it [another must have]
And finally, a program that can handle hotkeys. My dock only had a few icons, but most of my programs and tasks were opened by hotkeys. I need a program that can do that.

So there you have it, my miserable life with Vista is in your hands, I really didn't know what else to do since I've been trying to make a decent looking and at least mildly productive environment, but this is just too much, and sorry for this text wall but I hope you can understand my frustration... thanks a lot in advance.


Ðjin



PS. this is Vista Home Premium SP1

I haven't used Vista, on my mac now, so can't help much except for the hotkey thing. Ever tried Autohotkey (AHK, for short)? As for Ghost, I'd have thought Vista's Aero would have had that functionality...

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