Microsoft Plus! for Windows XP is a software package that lets you add some minimally useful functions to the new OS and enhance the visual features of its built-in Windows Media Player. TechTV Labs was initially wowed by the graphics and neat features, but they quickly become tiresome and predictable. The package does not contain enough desktop themes to keep us interested in the long term, so we give this Plus! a minus.

Aural and visual enhancements

To install all of the features of the Plus! pack, you will need about 300MB of hard disk space. You can reduce this by choosing a custom install and picking only the features you want. Plus! for Windows XP, like its predecessors for Windows 95 and 98, comes with themes and games (see interface). New in the XP version are so-called digital media enhancements, which are tools that add something new to audio and video functions in Windows XP. The most prominent is a voice command module for Windows Media Player (WMP), which lets you play albums and skip songs by speaking into a microphone. The speech recognition engine that Plus! uses is the same as that on Office XP, which we found to be intriguing, though inaccurate. If you don't already have the engine installed, you will need to train it to recognize your voice. Although it's a convenience, the time we spent training it was not worth being able to tell WMP to play, stop, or play DJ via our microphone.

To further promote the use of its Windows Media Audio, or WMA, format, Microsoft includes a tool to convert your existing MP3s into WMA. Although the company touts better audio quality -- while keeping the file size about half that of MP3 -- WMA is not as widely used as MP3, which makes the usefulness of this one-way media converter all the more dubious.

A speaker tool aims to enhance the sound coming out of your regular speakers by removing distortion. The software contains a list of about 30 speakers and their respective distortion profiles. Once configured, the speaker enhancement should produce better sound. In our tests, we found the tool lacking. It increased the bass of the speakers and produced a bigger sound, but it also drowned out some of the more subtle percussive sounds in the songs. You can produce a better, more customized sound with the equalizer in WMP. Other features in the Plus! pack include a CD label maker, a personal DJ that helps you build playlists, and skins for your WMP.

Prefab customization

You can use Plus!'s themes to customize your desktop. Themes are packs of sounds, icons, and other desktop enhancements that change the look of your operating system's interface. Plus! for Windows XP includes four themes, which extend from the desktop interface to the built-in Media Player. In Windows 98, you changed this by going to the system's Control Panel. With Plus! for Windows XP, changing a theme from the Plus! interface is a matter of choosing the theme, then the application opens the Themes tab from the Display Properties dialog box. From here, you can choose whether to accept all of the elements of the chosen theme or not. For example, if you like the icons, but not the fonts, click on the Appearance tab to change the font properties or even the desktop wallpaper.

Plus! for Windows XP also adds new visualizations and skins in Windows Media Player (see it up close). Visualizations are frequently cool, occasionally psychedelic graphics that display themselves in the media player window and "dance" to the beat of the music currently playing. Plus! adds three new visualizations: Undersea Wonders, Maxx's Kingdom, and a character from "Oddworld," a popular video game. These are accessible by clicking the Visualizations menu, then Plus!. Although we liked these new visualizations overall, particularly "Oddworld's" dancing alien, we could do without the Plus! intro screen every time we started these additional visualizations. Skins let you change the entire interface of WMP when it's in Skin mode. The most interesting of the bunch is based on a Leonardo da Vinci drawing, which transforms WMP into one of the artist's rendering of a flying machine (see image). But like the product's desktop counterparts, the novelty wears thin fast.