I am one of the guys who likes the 'personal' in PC. I want my computer to support my way of working instead of the other way around. And although a nice look of the desktop is important, productivity is more important to me. My customizations should make life easier for me, not harder. Also I'm pragmatic, I don't want to spend all my time tweaking my computer. I will invest some time, but after that it should be finished. Oh yeah, and I'm lazy  , I am happy to use what others have produced but don't want to write my own skins, docklets, etc.

Stardock,being a champion in customization, should be very interesting to me. I hoped. Well let's look. My Desktop offers the following:

WindowsBlinds: the hard of the My Desktop. But a nice skin is just that, a nice skin. And running two monitors of different sizes, I rather depend on UltraMon which adds two buttons to the windows frame with which I can maximize over the two monitors and switch an application between the two monitors with an automatic resize. Suffice to say those two buttons don't play well with WindowsBlinds. So no WindowsBlinds for me.

CursorXP: Nice and I've used it in the past. But in the end I found that odd cursor scapes made it hard to precisely use the mouse, and the cursors could behave oddly in some older applications. So, although nice I lost productivity and reverted to the default cursors.

DeskScapes: Well it offers an animated background. Not really a productivity enhancer. But is is really cool. Very cool. Extremely cool. And buggy. Especially if you change backgrounds. I haven't made up my mind about this one yet. If it is stable enough in normal use, I'm inclined to keep this one, but if it keeps playing up, I have not choice but to abandon it. Too early to tell yet, but I hope this one can stay.

Desktop X Professional: Well, as I'm not into producing gadgets myself, this one mainly is of interest to me for the stuff others are producing with it. And frankly, it is disappointing. How many clocks and calendars do you need? With this one you should be able to make far more compelling gadgets than with the Vista Sidebar. But still, if you look at what is available for Vista Sidebar, and what for Desktop X Professional, the latter is very disappointing. There is a single one which I felt compelled to use. Even for the Vista Sidebar I found the gadgets provided disappointing, but at least there were some gadgets which did offer me enhanced functionality. I was hoping for something like the Firefox plugins however, where there is ample supply of very good plugins to tailor your browsing experience.

IconDeveloper and Packager: Well, I'm not into icon development and my problem with other icon sets is that often they make it harder to recognize what the icon is representing. And although you can replace all Windows icons, you often have some special applications also, whose icons break the theme anyway. So, although nice (and again buggy in the case of Icon Packager), I tend not to bother with the icons.

LogonStudio Vista: I have used its predessors in the past, and they can be nice in combination with certain desktop themes. But righ now I normally use the hybrid sleep function of my computer, so I hardly see the bootscreen.

ObjectBar, ObectDock Plus, Enhanced FileDialog, Keyboard launchpad, ObjectDesktop Launchpad, Object Media, Tab LaunchPad, Right Click: Talking about enhancing functionality, this should be it. But Enhanced FileDialog, Object Media and Tab LaunchPad seem to be no longer in development, Impulse doesn't even offer more Info about them.

ObjectBar looks nice, and I've used in the past. But it also seems to be no longer in development. It hasn't seen a recent update, there are hardly any recent customizations available for it through Wincustomize, it was buggy to me and if failed to convince as a taskbar replacement. Which is a shame because I was really hoping it would. My breaking points were that I just want to use the standard Vista Aero theme which wouldn't go nicely with ObjectBar. And the Windows Taskbar offers me a thumbnail of my minimized windows on a mouse over, which ObjectBar didn't. ObjectBar does offer me customized pulldown menus, but in the end that was nog enough for me to switch from the Windows taskbar. A shame.

ObjectDock Plus is cool, but not really finished. The tabbed docks don't offer the same freedom with their look as the normal dock, which is a shame. And you have a number of cool effects behind the icons, but they also show up in the empty dock spaces. Again, I found the product quite buggy in its behaviour while configuring it, but this time the issues were minor. I've looked at using ObjectDock as taskbar replacement, and again, it just comes a little bit short. It doesn''t offer me Stardocks Virtual Desktop integration. In a dock I can include the taskbar bit or the tray bit, but not both. Besides the tray icons are too tiny for use in the normal dock. What is very cool is that you can place ObectDock right above the taskbar. All in all I'm inclined to keep ObjectDock Plus, although I'm still not too convinced about the Tabbed Dock. The Impulse Dock might be a better choice there, but it is too limited in its functionaly (and placement!) at the moment.

Keyboard launchpad looks cool, but is simply not for me. I haven't even programmed the extra keys of my keyboard yet, preferring the mosue to access my functionality. But I'm glad the functionality is available.

Right click: again cool, and perhaps one day I might use it. But I mainly use rightclick from my filebrowser replacement, Directory Opus, and it doesn't work there. But again, if I feel like it I might delve into this one a bit more one day.

All in all I must say that the customization I could obtain was a bit disappointing to me. Still my desktop is better than before, and I'm not finished yet