A lot has been posted on Make Use Of about docks, widgets, toolbars, and whole packages to transform your default Windows interface into something more appealing. The possibilities are endless and a new tool has just joined the scene.

Stardock’s MyColors is surprisingly quick and easy to handle. The download took a while, but the installation itself was super fast. It made me wonder how well the program was going to perform. I was surprised to find that applying the included Diamond theme went just as rapid.

If you’ve been a geek for any time now, you’ve no doubt ran into a problem with not enough desktop real estate. Maybe you don’t like to minimize all those windows, or maybe you just don’t want your application bar to be full of minimized programs.

WinRoll easily takes care of that for you.

Before

After

WinRoll was made so that it could “roll up” the current window into its title bar. Thus producing a very small window of an open application.

Windows Explorer probably lacks a few features that some people desperately require. It might be quite OK to use for the usual purposes, but when it comes to power tasks, it fails.

Here are seven carefully hand-picked utilities that enhance the default Windows Explorer functions and will leave you thinking “Why doesn’t Explorer have these by default?”

1. Folder Size

Windows Explorer, by default, doesn’t show the size of the folder when you opt for the ‘Details’ view. This is one of the little things that users will find lacking in Windows Explorer.

Back in February I asked for screenshots of your desktops and I promised the coolest would be featured on Make Use Of. So here are my three favorites in the order they were received.

(1) Skyler’s Desktop

The menu you see is Rocketdock, which has been covered and mentioned several times on Make Use Of. It’s a great tool if you quickly want to access your most used programs.

If you’re heavily addicted to Friendfeed, you will be interested in the Adobe AIR application which has just come out called Alertthingy. It shows promise and I quite like it but it’s not yet showing the major mojo needed to tear me away from my RSS reader.

Alertthingy is benefiting at the moment from a big wave of online hype and anticipation which has been surrounding the project for ages. The application, which sits on your desktop, basically acts like a miniature RSS reader and provides you with all the updates left by your Friendfeed contacts. It’s fast and works quite well.

I got my first (and only) Mac about a year ago and discovered I hated one of the major features that makes OS X different from Windows. I resented having to move my mouse so high, just to get at the file or edit menu way up there in the menu bar. I’ve since come to love the menu bar and I’ve recently begun experimenting with some small apps that sit there unobtrusively waiting for me to glance at them or access them — often with a hotkey.