I’m pretty impressed with the job Microsoft did with the ClearType font smoothing in XP. Its supposed to be primarily for LCD screens, but I was just playing around yesterday and turned it on and was really pleased with the difference it made, even on my CRT monitors. Even more fun are the Visual Styles[]2 for XP I’ve been trying out from ThemeXP. I never understood why Microsoft released XP with a full skinning engine but only made two skins (XP and Windows Classic) and then locked out the ability to add user created styles. I suppose they were hoping to cash in later with their own proprietary styles. Well, no matter because with a simple patched .dll you can install your own visual styles and have all kinds of fun with your desktop. Or maybe something a bit more shocking (and potentially blasphemous to any rabid Windows evangelists)