I noticed there hasn't been a review of WindowsBlinds written in a while, and to give a perspective on previous reviews, I must provide a little bit of a historical background (very little).

The first time I took notice to this little program called WindowsBlinds was during the age of Windows95. When WindowsBlinds was first released, it was an utility to make your Window "roll up" into a "blind", behaving much like MacOS. It was a nice little tool to make your multi-tasking more organized. At some point, a great idea came along... to use WindowsBlinds not only for a limited set of features, but to use it to "skin" Windows.

For a long time though, WindowsBlinds was one of those application you would get for the glitz, but can certainly do without. It was an application that ran on top of Windows, eating up a good amount of resource. It made Windows95 unstable, and furthermore did not work with all applications. This situation improved with Windows 2000, some of the performance and stability improvement probably had as much to do with Windows 2000 being a more stable and better multitasking platform and code optimization as well.

However, with the release of Windows XP, I can say all that has changed dramatically. Windows XP's interface is actually based on a form of XML, which means it was made from the ground up to be customizable and changeable.

Microsoft did not want to release any sort of toolkit to do this, because of the technical support nightmare it may cause itself when it allows user to do whatever they wanted with the interface. (not to mention many other marketing issues involved with branding and looks). However they did allow some developers to get their hands under the GUI. StarDock being one of them.

Now WindowsBlinds is more integrated into the OS than ever, when you're running WindowsXP, you don't feel any performance degradation at all, since the functionality to change the UI is supported from the ground up. There are tons of different skins on http://www.wincustomize.com, although not all of them are XP-compatible (although personally I haven't had any problems with using skins that aren't specifically made for WinXP).

This is a very cheap program, and something that people who feel like adding that personal touch to their PC must have. Not to say it still requires some good hardware to run... since that WindowsXP requires a pretty good machine to begin with.

Not just that, if instead of spending $20 for WindowBlinds, you spend $50 and spring for ObjectDesktop, StarDock's all-in-one package.. you get all the updates for subsequent applications, and also all the other various application that StarDock also creates (such as DesktopX)...

Overall, this software may not be necessary, but it is certainly a great value. Definitely recommended.

Recommended: Yes