HOW TO - Turn Windows XP to Windows 7 Theme

Just completed another little project of turning a Windows XP Home laptop to Windows 7 look. This Dell Inspiron 700m is too slow to install a Windows 7 OS, with just a Intel Pentium M 1.6GHz CPU, 512MB RAM and a 40GB HDD. The CPU benchmark according to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php is 406, more or less the same as a Thinkpad T30. Yet, I'm surprised of its good condition and wide screen configuration.

This is the final look, what do you think? It doesn't look old at all!!

After the theme change, I'm so happy that it didn't take much of the system resources. After system loaded, it still got about 300MB RAM for use.

Here're the steps to do such a theme change:

• Download the needed theme files theme files - http://www.deviantart.com/download/133568262/SevenVG_RTM_Theme_for_XP_by_Vishal_Gupta.zip
• Extract the files to a folder, read the readme text files under each subfolder
• Go to the Theme folder and run the Theme.exe
• Go to each of the rest of the folder, follow the text documents; or click on the executable files under each folder; exception is the shellstyle.dll, which you need to copy manually to the specified location
• Restart your computer

Using Styler - 
The key part of the whole style change is on the Styler, which should appear at the bottom right corner as a yellowish snake icon. Right click on the Styler icon, choose Show. Under Style, double click on the Themes folder, select SevenVGRB. Select other tabs and make other settings as you like.

Show Desktop Rectangular button - The Show Desktop button at the bottom right corner of Windows 7 is a handy shortcut. To add this function to XP, download this little tool to your computer and create a shortcut to it in program startup:
http://www.deviantart.com/download/133022210/Show_Desktop_by_CeIIular.rar

Other Themes -

Other themes are available, this link provides more information:

http://www.askvg.com/sevenvg-rtm-download-windows-7-rtm-theme-for-windows-xp/ 

There're ways to do more tricks... however, strike a balance, everything you download and install will eat up certain resources from your computer, which is already lacking resources...

Final Words -
Of course, it just have the look; function-wise, can't compare with Windows 7. If you really want to try something new, another direction will be go Linux. There's a version of Ubuntu, called Lubuntu, which should run pretty smooth on such a low performance old machine. The look, also pretty cool. Check this out - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/GetLubuntu