OSXtreme for XP: It's not OSX but it's close

The title OSXtreme is in reference to a shell I made for the Pocket PC operating system back in the day, which took the crappy Pocket PC OS and gave it most of the functions of a Windows OS and gave it a cool OSX look. My goal is to now give Windows XP all the friendlyness and functionality of OSX... and do it for free... and be able to transfer this functionality from computer to computer. Before I had thought this impossible, but I have made some recent discoveries which lead me to believe that this is a goal well within reach.

ICONS:
Windows XP can use 64x64 pixel icons, but for some reason all of the standard windows icons are 32x32. Additionally, I have finally found free icon packing software, which can convert multiple images into an icon pack. I have converted and am currently using the Crystal icon set for Linux, and am setting these to all of the windows icon defaults. It looks pretty nice, and with any luck the windows theme creation tool should allow me to export these icons with relative ease. I would be happy to give these icon sets and themes to any of my friends who want them, but due to legal reasons, I do not want to post them online.

SEARCH FUNCTION:
OSX Tiger is supposed to put everything into a cache so that its search is instantaneous. In comparison, a Windows search can take up to 5 minutes. Yesterday, I found a tool that gives this functionality to Windows. It's another free tool from our newly public friends at Google called Google Desktop. Its quite something, type in a phrase and it will instantaneously give you every document on your computer with that phrase in its title or in its text. It also has integrated email search, rss reader (which you can use to keep track of all your friends updates to their blogs), and a whole bunch of other things which you can turn off if you so desire. I actually rather like the picture slideshow, I expected it to be a distraction, but I find it

EXPOSE:
A cool trick in OSX is Exposé; this has ability to hit a button which allows you to see every open window on the screen by shrinking them. You can then click on one of these small windows and everything will be restored to full size and the one you selected will be brought to the front. iEx is a free tool that does this for windows. I havn't tried it yet, but I plan to when I get back to my computer. And of course, it's free.

OTHER SOFTWARE, FIREFOX:
Why use Firefox in place of Internet Explorer? If the higher security, stronger ad blocking power, and hundreds of useful plug-ins aren't your thing, it also looks a lot nicer with its many skins. I like using Mostly Crystal, because it "mostly" uses the same Crystal icon set I am using to replace the windows icons and the curves are very pleasant on the eyes.

OTHER SOFTWARE, THUNDERBIRD:
Why use Thunderbird as your email client? Well it's about a hundred times more powerful than Outlook Express, and has all the high security and plug-in features of Firefox, and it can be skinned as well. I use the Mostly Crystal skin for this program as well.

OTHER SOFTWARE, OPEN OFFICE:
Open Office is an MS Office replacement (yes I know that this has nothing to do with OSX, but it has everything to do with functionality). It mimics each of the MS Office programs for free (except Outlook, see Thunderbird above), so if you find yourself without a legal copy of MS Office for your computer, why not make the leap to Open Office? Or you can just stick it to the man, you know you want to.

Oh well, I've got to get going, peace out and word to your respective mothers.