Windows 7 was released to manufaturing by Microsoft on 22nd July 2009 and retail available by the end of October 2009. Microsoft introduced a new design for Windows 7 taskbar. If you do not plan to upgrade to Windows 7 and at the same time you want to have the nice Windows 7 taskbar on your Windows XP/Vista, you can use this small application to make Windows XP/Vista taskbar look like the Windows 7 taskbar.

ViGlance - Windows 7 SuperBar for XP is a small application that allows you to have a Windows 7 taskbar look on Windows XP and Vista. Using ViGlance enables you to get almost all of Windows 7 taskbar features such as pinning application shortcut to taskbar, reordering taskbar icons and window thumbnails. The start button will be replaced with Windows 7 Start Orb.

To install ViGlance, download ViGlance zip file and extract it to a new folder. Then, run 'ViGlance OneStep.exe'. ViGlance will run on your system tray.

It all started a few weeks ago. My internet connection to certain websites such as my blog (tmsnetwork.org) and Wikipedia became very bad. Most of the time, I got the 'unable to establishing connection' error and I need to refresh the page 3 or 4 times in order for the web pages to load. Download speed is OK once I got connected, but 'creating' a connection is very hard. When I try to ping my blog, seems I got the 'TTL expired in transit' error at 58.27.103.233. 58.27.103.233 is belong to TMNet. Here is my solution: increasing the TTL value on my system, and so far, it works like charm! TTL or Time to live is a limit on the period of time or number of iterations or transmissions in computer and computer network technology that a unit of data (e.g. a packet) can experience before it should be discarded (Wikipedia).

To change the default TTL value in Windows XP or Windows Vista, open registry editor (go to Run, and type regedit). BACKUP YOUR REGISTRY BEFORE PROCEEDING! Navigates to 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Tcpip\Parameters'. Find 'DefaultTTL' (1). If there is no 'DefaultTTL', right click in the empty area in the registry editor, choose New > DWORD value (2), and name it 'DefaultTTL' (without the ' character). Double click 'DefaultTTL' and set its value to 128 (3). Restart your system for the changes to take effect. Try pingging the problematic websites again. If you still have the 'TTL explired in transit', try incrasing the 'DefaultTTL' value. You can increase the value up to 255.

Want to change the look of your Windows XP? This site has some alternative shellpacks. Some screenshots:

BricoPack Elements Suite

BuufXP