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It’s a PC user’s dream : to be on a mac. Actually what motivates this craving desire for the mac, imho, is the look : both the hardware(the mac) and the accompanying OSX look great. It’s stylish, fresh and sleek.

But if you’re on a PC, no need to despair or hack it down to make it look like a mac. I’ll concentrate here with aquafying the OS. First you should know that if you’re on a PC and using either Windows or Linux, stay with it. No need to use things like the tweaked Intel Mac OS/hackintosh, that will put the real OSX on your PC. Even if you happen to get this working, it would take you long to get a fully functional PC with the Intel Mac OS installed; it would take you time to hunt down the drivers for your hardware and then there aren’t much software that would like to be run on such a configuration.

What you should be doing, instead, to fulfill that envy of yours to see your PC look like a mac is to mod/tweak only the required parts of the OS that I’ll describe here. Windows/Linux’s interfaces are rather good so no need to add superfluous things like a dock when the taskbar is here to grab all your opened applications. Furthermore don’t you find the explorer good enough to manage the access to your files? It’s not fully functional so just follow on where we’ll try to remedy to this situation.

Before going any further, I’ll concentrate more on the XP/Vista mod further on. For Linux’s users, check out the corresponding tutorial, Mac4Lin here and change accordingly. That guide will show you how to mod an Ubuntu Linux distro installed on a PC but as I’ve already said, there are many things that I think needn’t be touched : like tinkering with the taskbar.(On Ubuntu, this gets really messy, since you’ll have to get Compiz fusion working in order to install the AWN dock).

So let’s get that sleek mac look down on our Windows installed PC. In fact, it’s just some simple things to be changed/added : nothing complicated and most importantly nothing that will change the behaviour of Windows - which is our main objective here.

I told you it would be simple, so here’re those steps :

• Download the wallpapers ; your desktop should shine like an apple : download OSX wallpapers here, Tiger OSX wallpapers here, Panther OSX wallpapers here and check out some stunning modded wallpapers(mac osx/iphones/ipods derivatives too) here. Extract them and apply your new OSX wallpaper on your PC.
• Download the MacOSX fonts here and apply them following this guide.
• Download Leopard X theme that comes with 3 visual styles : iTunes, Tiger and Leopard look. Extract the package’s content to /windows/resources/themes. Then you should be having a folder called X and the Leopard X theme file. Click on the Leopard X theme file to apply the new theme or to select the different visual styles.

Tiger theme :

Leopard theme :

Itunes theme :

• Skin Firefox and Thunderbird

MacOSX skin for Firefox :
MacOSX skin for Thunderbird :

• Replace Windows default sidebar folder view with Findexer, a small application that once installed will provide you with a sidebar panel similar to that found on Finder for mac osx. No lengthy configuration required. It’s ready to use once installed.

That should be it. Leave the rest because XP/Linux is good enough to sit on your PC although many mac fans advocate the contrary : Windows/Linux is good. No need to buy an EXPENSIVE(read me carefully) mac to get just that sleek look. If you want to try out OSX, then better buy it because that will cost your more tinkering with your PC to get OSX on it. And I’m firm sure that you haven’t learnt enough of the marvels your PC can do to get rid of it now for a mac. So rejoice PC users, stop dreaming of that utopian mac osx look on your pc, you’ve just got it now. Wake up, neo.. Oh I mean PC user. Cheers

P.S : While many boast the simplicity that you can get by using FlyAKiteOSX or WinOSX2 to get that macosx look on your PC, I wouldn’t advise you to use such software for the simple reason that they change many of Windows’ core items that could easily make your system sluggish and cause irreversible damage too.