Plus's screensavers are slick, particularly Aquarium, a photo-realistic virtual fish tank that has, believe it or not, fooled a cat on more than one occasion, and MyPictures, a customizable screensaver that lets you use your own digital photos. We were hoping to land themes that would completely recast XP's interface to look like Mac OS X or BeOS. The desktop themes-collections of icons, wallpaper, sounds, mouse pointers, and other graphical elements-are snappy, but you're limited to back-to-nature, outer space, and Leonardo da Vinci-style decor. The first and second feature desktop decorators, the third a way to kill time when XP's bundled games get old, and the fourth a seven-pack collection of Windows Media Player add-ons. Plus's accessories come in four flavors: themes, screensavers, games, and digital audio. You can even apply a theme or a screensaver, run a game, or launch one of the audio tools from here.

This launchpad is easy to use, with links that take you to Plus games, themes, screensavers, and digital audio add-ons. You can get to all of its accessories from a one-screen interface that you launch from the Start menu. Save yourself $35 to $40 and spend it on something XP really needs: an antivirus program. You can find a lot of the same or similar tools on the Web for free. Where it used to populate Plus with engrossing entertainment (think Pinball in Plus 95) or useful utilities (such as VirusScan in Plus 98), Microsoft Plus for XP gives you only lightweight add-ons: desktop themes, screensavers, borderline games, and audio enhancements that should have been part of the OS from the start. But this time, Microsoft has gone too far. Whenever it launches a new version of Windows, Microsoft offers Plus as an after-market collection of add-ons for home users. Save yourself $35 to $40 and spend it on something XP needs: an antivirus program.

Windows 98 Plus Screensavers