If at all possible try to park or store your RV on a solid surface like pavement or concrete. Try to avoid grass, fields or wooded areas.

here.

Looking to really get organised? Desktop search is good, but many of us have piles of CD-R or DVD-R disks kicking around our workplaces. Wouldn't it be great if there was something that could neatly catalogue all those files too? Well, there is. The aptly named "WhereIsIt?" is able to neatly organise and catalogue not only files on your hard disk but files stashed away on removable disks too. WhereIsIt? Is shareware, with the full version costing $39.95 per licence. Enter "WhereIsIt" into Google to find out more.

Look and Feel

For those systems able to run it, the new Aero interface in Windows Vista is both fast and beautiful. By comparison, the blues and creams of Windows XP look distinctly last generation. Of course, beauty is only skin deep and what really matters is functionality. That said, a little more eye candy obviously appeals to a lot of people, since numerous web-sites and utilities have sprung up for Windows XP with the sole aim of making the operating system look better. The pinnacle of these utilities is the Object Desktop suite from Stardock. With a few clicks you can instantly transform your XP desktops look and feel into any of hundreds of visual styles available for download from Stardock's website. Want Aero-like special effects on Windows XP? Object Desktop Window FX can do them and you can even customise exactly which visual effects to use. Want two start menus? No problem, with Objectbar you can do that too. Want Windows Dreamscene animated wallpapers? Well sorry, you are out of luck this time. The price for all this desktop pimping? $49.95. To find out more, or download a trial version, enter object desktop into Google. All this talk of desktop enhancements brings us nicely on to:-

Sidebar and Widgets

Windows Vista comes with it's own sidebar with detachable widgets, but sidebars and widgets are old news in Windows (and indeed in most other modern operating systems too). My favourite XP sidebar is the somewhat unoriginally named "Desktop Sidebar". This sidebar is highly configurable, uncluttered and includes the best RSS news reader/ticker out of all the sidebars and widgets I have ever tried. In fact I even run Desktop Sidebar in preference to Vistas own sidebar on my Windows Vista installation. Google search for "desktop sidebar" to find out more.

If widgets are you thing then there are currently several competing standards. The Open Widget Engine is gaining momentum slowly, with the aim of one day uniting the efforts of widget makers across the world. Until that day comes, you can choose between Google Desktop, Desktop X and Yahoo Widgets. Desktop X is a powerful widget engine that is included as part of the Object Desktop suite that I mentioned in the Look and Feel section. Yahoo and Google's respective offerings are free and hence much more popular. Yahoo widgets probably includes the best selection of widgets out of all the widget engines available. Again, do a quick Google search on the program that interests you the most to find out more.

Media Centre

Windows XP media centre edition has been around for a while now, but an upgrade to Vista Ultimate or Home Premium will give you full media centre capabilities included in the price. If you are using vanilla XP home or Professional and you want media centre capabilities, they are available for free in the shape of Media Portal, an open source and highly configurable media centre application. Also free and worth a look (at least if you are American) is Yahoo Go For TV. Based on Meedio, which was one of the best commercial media centre products for Windows, Go For TV seems to have been left to stagnate since Yahoo took control. Nevertheless there are already a wide range of plug-ins and accessories available for it that were previously developed for Meedio. Bizarrely, Yahoo currently insists on locking out all users outside of the United States, so if you live elsewhere in the world, give this one a miss. Set Google hunting for "media portal" or "Yahoo Go for TV" to find out more.

Games and Direct X 10

As any PC gamer will tell you, XP is (at the time of writing) the best operating system for games. With Vista, Microsoft introduced DirectX10 and made it Vista only. A number of breathtaking DirectX 10 games are regularly plastered over the preview pages on major PC gaming websites and magazines. To date however, aside from a few update patches for older games, Microsoft's cutting edge games for DirectX10/Vista basically consist of Shadowrun (an above average multiplayer FPS) and Halo 2 (A conversion of an old Xbox game). Re-hashing a previous generation console title to demonstrate your bleeding edge graphics technology must have made sense to someone in Microsoft but it makes little sense to gamers assessing if an upgrade to Vista is worth their money, especially in light of the performance handicap or crippled sound that some games exhibit under Vista. However, like every new gaming platform, fast forward to Christmas and XP gamers can expect to be enviously eyeing up the new Vista only games starting to appear. If you are hoping that I'm going to tell you now some way of getting DirectX 10 to work on XP, you are going to be disappointed. A company called Falling Leaf systems claims to be working on some sort of project that would accomplish this feat, but they still have a lot to prove especially considering early versions struggled to run the most basic of DirectX 10 demo code. Unfortunately, it looks like DirectX 10 is one trick that XP isn't going to be performing any time soon, if ever.

So there you have it, far from being on its last legs, Windows XP is still a very capable operating system with a fair few tricks up its sleeve. If you're willing to invest in a little new software mentioned in this article (much of which also works under Vista) you can easily transform your XP into a top notch operating system and still enjoy your old games and multimedia software.

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