Does it take a long time? Yes. Is it worth it? Hell yeah.

RocketDock
http://www.rocketdock.com

A windows version of the dock application based on the Mac dock. Except its better because its on windows of course. =)

If you’ve ever seen the Mac dock you’ll know what to expect. You can add icons to the dock, and also folders of icons using the Stacks Docklet (a separate download, here). In fact there are all kinds of addons available on the site, although most are fairly simple stuff, usually just adding a shutdown button or some other trivial function.

Rocketdock also shows your minimized tasks, and I can happily report it works very well with previously blogged app miniMize.

Apple recently won a legal battle to patent the dock, so it may not be around forever, as they’ll no doubt try and keep it exclusive to macs. hopefully by that stage the geniuses behind XGL or Bumptop will have created some ingenious new way to interact with our PCs.

TaskSwitch XP
(http://www.ntwind.com/software/taskswitchxp/download.html)

Even with miniMize and RocketDock, you’ll still need to alt-tab occasionally (sometimes its just more instinctive). TaskSwitchXP replaces the default alt-tab menu with a much better one, which allows sticky mode (the menu stays on the screen until you pick something with the mouse) and is super-customisable.

AutoHotKey

Autohotkey, as you can probably guess, lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to a whole variety of tasks. Not just other keyboard combinations, but also windows functions and DLL calls allowing you to set up all kinds of neat tricks.

I'd been reading about autohotkey on lifehacker and other sites for a few weeks before I bothered to give it a go. I was one of those people who believed I didn't really need anymore keyboard shortcuts. My how things have changed in just a month.

I started with a simple script that launches notepad with win + N. Nothing innovative. Its the standard tutorial sample when u install ahk. But once I realised how easy it was to configure, I started trying other stuff. Now I find it damn near indespensible.

In one month my ahk file has grown from one function to more than a dozen. The options are limitless. Heres a sample of some of the functionality I've set up.

Win+PauseBreak – Mute Sound
Win+Up Arrow – increase volume
Win+Down Arrow – decrease volume
Win+F – launch firefox, or switch to it if already launched
Win+X – launch xplorer_lite, or switch to it if already launched
Win+F12 – launch foobar, or switch to it if already launched
Win+N – launch notepad++, or switch to it if already launched
Win+C – copy selected files from one pane to another in xplorer
Win+V – move selected files from one pane to another in xplorer

I've also added alt-tab functionality to the mousewheel and added a quake style console prompt using this instructables tutorial.

On the laptop, its come in even handier, allowing my eject button to also function as delete and printscreen depending on modifiers.

Autohotkey is extremely useful, and is also effortless to install run and learn, taking up almost no memory or CPU and sitting out of the way in the system tray. I urge you to try it as soon as you can. You won't look back.

this is a cool little one. it rolls together three functions usually found in different programs.

1. it allows you to minimize taskbar programs to the tray
2. it allows you to change the transparency of a window
3. it allows you to change the priority of an application

and all from a neat little right click context menu!