Last year, we assembled a group of tips and tricks to make your Windows 98 or Me machine look, act, and work like Microsoft's new OS. Since then, we've found plenty more. These 15 sneaky ways to mimic Window XP's looks, performance, and functionality rank among the best. In fact, they're so good that we bet you won't be able to tell the real XP from the fake one we created.

Until the economy climbs out of the cellar, we're going to build on what we already have rather than spend big bucks on the latest and greatest; most of these tweaks are flat-out free. Read on to find out how to get more out of your tired but oh-so-true OS.

Reinvent your PC
Give your old--but still cranking--OS a face-lift.

Tweak your performance
Chances are your clunky PC won't beat a new Windows XP system, but these five speed tweaks will improve your times.

Add XP-like functionality
You can get a lot of XP's bells and whistles from other sources. We'll show you how.

Reinvent your PC

Whether you want to rip away Windows 98's interface or sharpen your OS text, we have you covered. These five tips will help you transform the look of Windows 98 or Millennium so that it resembles Windows XP. Best of all, you won't have to spend a red cent.

XP icons without XP
There's no denying that Windows XP's icons look snappier than past versions'. Want a new look? Start with your icons. While making your own suave icons can be a worthwhile hobby for some (if you decide to dabble in the icon fashion industry, we recommend that you try the shareware program Microangelo), it isn't a vocation everyone has time for. Fortunately, there's a great shortcut you can use to transform Windows 98 or Me into XP-like beauties.

First, download and install IconPackager on your 98 or Me machine, then head to WinCustomize, a site teeming with downloadable skins, or interface designs. Click the IconPackager link under Library (at the left of the screen), then, in the search field at the top of the window, type XP and click Go. We found 10 different XP-style icon packages to download. Our faves? XP Set v2 and the follow-up, XP Set v3.

More fake XP faces
WindowBlinds, a nifty desktop mutation app, came out with version 3.0 in late November. We're keen on WindowBlinds now more than ever, thanks to several improvements. Most important, WindowBlinds now takes a smaller toll on the performance of older 98 and Me systems. If you want to make Windows 98 or Windows Me look like XP, WindowBlinds XPLuna is a good skin to try. The newer XP-ish skin, XP Professional v2, won't make your PC a clone of XP, but it comes mighty close. Scads more XP-ish skins have cropped up at sites such as WinCustomize.

There are also some non-XP skins that beat XP hands down in the usability department. Just because a skin has the letters X and P in the title doesn't mean you can't use it if you run Windows 98 or Me. You can--as long as you have WindowBlinds 3.0 on board. Our favorite XP replacement so far is OSXP (available from WinCustomize), which includes controls for Winamp in the title bar of every window.

See more clearly
Although there's no way to duplicate ClearType--the XP technology that dramatically improves readability, especially on LCD screens, you should use the font-smoothing feature available for your version of Windows. Font smoothing is built into Windows 98 and Me, but you may not have it enabled. To check, head to the Display Properties settings, which you can pull up by right-clicking any empty spot on the desktop and choosing Properties from the pop-up menu. Click the Effects tab, then look to see if the "Smooth edges of screen fonts" box is checked. If it's not, check it and click OK. Your eyes will thank you.

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't include font smoothing in Windows 95 (it came with the aftermarket collection of add-ons known as Plus), but you can now download it free from the Microsoft Web site. Do so ASAP.

Show me the picture
Both Windows Me and XP include a built-in image viewer that lets you quickly browse images in your folders, zoom in and out on the images, and rotate and print them--all without opening a large graphics editor such as Photoshop.

Windows 98 folks, however, are left out in the cold. Thankfully, it doesn't take much to reap a similar benefit. Download and install the free IrfanView, a popular image previewer and viewer for all editions of Windows.

Look at my dog, Skip
Windows XP comes with a basic slide-show screensaver (select Display Properties > Screensavers > My Pictures Slideshow) that's perfect for showing off the most recent photos of your trip to Paris, your new kitten, or your kids.

This trick isn't just for those of you with Windows XP, however. Windows Me offers something just like it, also available in the Screensavers tab of Display Properties, called "My pictures screen saver." To get this effect on your Windows 98 machine, download gPhotoShow, a free slide-show screensaver that randomly shuffles JPEG, BMP, and GIF images on the screen.

Tweak your performance

XP promises to punch up your PC's performance, and, in our tests, it got the job done. These five tips will enhance your performance with an older OS, but they can only do so much. Inevitably, you'll come up a tad short of XP's stellar performance. But who says you should stop trying?

More memory, please
Windows XP is as fast as Windows 2000 (which we relied on before XP showed up), and, according to our tests, it's speedier than either Windows 98 or Me.

To give Windows 98 or Me a kick in the behind, add more memory to your machine. This is a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone tip, since you'll probably need to add RAM to your machine if you intend to upgrade to XP down the road, as XP needs at least 128MB of RAM to work. Thankfully, memory is pretty cheap these days.

Crash-test dummy
No doubts on this end: Windows XP has proven to be the most solid, most stable Windows ever aimed at consumers. We've been running it for months and have had only one serious, blue-screen-of-death-style crash.

As we said, there's simply no way to make Windows 98 or Me as solid as XP. Instead, you should patch up an older OS as best as you can.

One way to smooth out your OS bumps is to purchase a crash protector. Crash protectors such as Symantec CrashGuard, now discontinued, were once integral parts of every cautious computer user's software collection. These utilities watch for system and application crashes, then try to intercept them before they bring down your whole OS or destroy chunks of data. There's only one survivor from the crash protector days of yore, and it's free. Download and install Stay Alive 2000 on your Windows 98 or Me machine. It's small--less than 1MB--and consumes a mere 200K of memory. Sure, it won't stop every crash, but it's better than facing a flaky OS alone.

Standby and Hibernate
Microsoft claims that XP resurrects itself from the power-saving Standby and Hibernate modes faster than Windows Me does. (In other words, the current state of your system is saved to hard disk so that it comes alive almost instantly when you later power it back on.) According to eTesting Labs, XP indeed recovers up to 19 percent faster--good news for laptop users who rely on these modes to save battery juice and get back to work quickly without forfeiting lots of power.

Both Windows Me and Windows 98 also support Standby and Hibernate, but, while this power-saving function is automatically available in Me, you have to turn it on in 98. Standby places your entire system in a low-power state (use it when you take a lunch break, for example), while Hibernate puts your machine in a deep sleep (use this mode overnight). To turn on Hibernate in Windows 98, select Settings > Control Panel, then open the Power Options (in Me) or Power Management (in 98) applet. Click the Hibernate tab. (If there is no Hibernate tab, your PC's hardware doesn't support this feature.) Check the Enable Hibernate Support box, then click OK. Now, when you choose Shut Down from the Start menu, the Hibernate option appears as one of the choices in the Shut Down Windows dialog.

If you encounter problems in Windows Me, use the built-in Power Management Troubleshooter to diagnose your problem (select Help from the Start menu, type troubleshooter into the Search field, then scroll down the resulting list and click Power Management Troubleshooter). If you're using Windows 98, download the Power Management Troubleshooter tool from Microsoft's Web site.

Help on tap
Windows XP boasts a much-improved help tool: it combines the traditional help tools that come bundled with Windows with the ability to query Microsoft's online support (assuming you're connected to the Internet), including its Knowledge Base database of problems and solutions.

There's no way to clone XP's Help and Support Center on other OSs, but you can improve the way you access technical support. Of course, the surest way to get help in a jiffy is to bookmark Microsoft Support in your browser. Microsoft recently redesigned its technical support site so that it's more organized and much easier to use than before. Search the Knowledge Base from the opening page of the site (use the search field at the left of the screen), access downloads, and post questions to Microsoft newsgroups.

For even faster access, you should also bookmark the appropriate support center for your version of Windows: Me, 98, or 2000. Also, bookmark the first page of the Microsoft newsgroup site to quickly browse for answers to common problems or to post your own question.

Smaller shots
Open the My Pictures folder (it's tucked inside My Documents) in Windows XP, and there's a link at the left side under "File and folder tasks" called E-mail This File. When you select an image and click this link, a "Send pictures via e-mail" dialog pops up, and, if you let it, Windows XP will reduce the size of your picture so that it uploads and downloads faster.

You can do the same thing in Windows 98 and Me if you have WinZip 8.1 installed. WinZip adds new commands to the right-click menu, so when you select any file, you'll see an option called Zip And E-mail that compresses any file (XP's tool is really intended for images) and attaches it to an outbound e-mail message ready for addressing.

XP's and WinZip's tools work equally well, but only when the original image is 800x600 pixels or smaller. When run through XP, larger digital photos are rendered much smaller (since the OS actually reduces resolution).

Add XP-like functionality

If you spend any time at all browsing Microsoft's Windows XP Web site, it may give you the idea that the folks in Redmond came up with everything from zipping files to connecting two computers.

Wrong. To prove our point--and to prove that Windows 98 and Me aren't dead yet, thank you very much--we've assembled these five tips to show you how to add features found in XP to your older, slower OSs.

Zip it up
Windows XP, like Windows Me before it, builds in support for the ZIP file format: it displays zipped files as folders, from which you drag files to extract them from the archive. You can also create ZIP-style archives from within Windows.

If you run Windows 98 or 95, you'll have to add this capability to your PC. It's easy: just download and install the premier ZIP utility, WinZip 8.1. WinZip adds commands to the right-click menu within Windows Explorer so that you can extract and compress files with minimal fuss.

It's about time
One of our favorite behind-the-scenes XP tricks is automatic clock synchronization. Computer clocks are notorious for not keeping good time--our Windows 98 and Me machines typically lose a minute or two every couple of weeks--so if you rely on the PC's clock rather than your wristwatch, you'll need to manually update the time now and then--a real pain.

XP, however, automatically synchronizes your PC's clock with a server that tracks time by the official sources: the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Naval Observatory. That's not a new idea; in fact, you can keep your own PC's clock updated in the same way.

Download and install the free Atomic Clock Sync, the most popular clock-keeper-upper on CNETAsia's Download.com. This free download gets the correct time from NIST's servers, and, since it can be set to automatically update your PC's clock, does the same job as XP.

Cascading controls
We like the way XP turns the Control Panel into a cascading-style menu under the Start menu, making for faster selection of the applet we're after. (A cascading menu is one like those under the Programs part of the Start menu; when you select a folder, all the contents of that folder automatically appear in another menu to the side.)

If you use Windows Me, just turn on the Cascading Control Panel feature. From the Start menu, select Settings > Taskbar & Start Menu. Click the Advanced tab and, in the list at the bottom of the dialog, check the box marked Expand Control Panel. Click OK.

Incorporating this feature into Windows 98 and earlier editions is a bit trickier. The fastest way is to download Tweak UI, a freebie from Microsoft. After you install this program, it shows up as a Control Panel applet. Run it, then click the Desktop tab. In the list under the Desktop tab, right-click Control Panel and choose Create As File, then choose the Desktop for its new location. Click the Save button.

Now there's a new folder, called Control Panel, on the desktop. Drag it to the Start button and drop it onto the spot where you want it to appear. We put it at the top of the Programs list, but another great place is right under the Start button. Voilà! Cascading menus for the Control Panel.

A friend in need is a friend indeed
Number 8 on Microsoft's Top 10 reasons to get Windows XP Home Edition is, and we quote:

Remote Assistance:
Remote Assistance lets you allow a friend or support professional who is also running Windows XP to remotely control your computer to demonstrate a process or help solve a problem.

Hello? Remote control, which is essentially what Remote Assistance is, has been around for years. (CNET recently revisited the remote control app category; check out our roundup here.)

If you want to help out a friend or family member who don't have XP (you must have Windows XP installed on both computers in order to use Remote Assistance), you and the person on the other end have several options to get the two of you connected. The best way, we think, is to use the free trial of GoToMyPC to connect the two computers over the Internet. This Web service lets you access and control a Windows PC from any other Windows machine anywhere, anytime. The free trial expires after you've been connected for 60 minutes, but that may be long enough to solve the problem. If you like what GoToMyPC does (and we do), you can subscribe for $20 per month. That's pricey, but there's nothing that says you can't sign up, pay one month's fee, solve your friend's troubles (or get yours fixed by a technically astute friend), and cancel the plan.

Card, please
We're the first to admit that we waste a ton of time playing Solitaire on the PC. Windows XP harbors this productivity killer, too. In fact, the XP edition issues some new designs for the card deck, and, unlike some of the decks bundled with earlier editions, they're not as ugly as sin.

We haven't figured out a way to rip off the new deck designs from XP and bring them into Me or 98, but we have found some cool freebies that beat classic Solitaire. Our top two picks: 123 Free Solitaire and South Park Solitaire.

And just because you're not using Windows Me or XP, both of which have online games (such as Internet Backgammon and Internet Checkers) in their Start menus, doesn't mean you can't play these simple games over the Web for free. Just head to MSN Gaming Zone, where, as long as you have a Passport account, you can play backgammon, spades, cribbage, checkers, chess, hearts, and other games at no charge. (The Gaming Zone is the same Web site used by the Internet games included with XP and Me.)