We’ve all seen how beautiful Mac OS X’s dock is, who can resist the nice smooth zoom effects and the auto-hiding ability of this little apple invention.  It defeats the windows taskbar hands-down.  This being the case it was only natural for windows users to start wanting the ability to use this invention on thier own machines.  Thus was born the third-party dock applications, two of which (out of the many) are Rocket Dock and Object Dock.

One would expect that Object Dock, being a software you have to pay for would have an array of features that sets it apart from its freeware counterparts.  Now, although it does exhibit quite a number of extra features that rocket dock does not have, admittingly these features are next to useless.  My personal experience is that I have been able to do everything I did with Object dock on my desktop computer with Rocket Dock on my laptop.  In terms of resource eating, both these applications will consume ram (as does any application) but whether it is noticeable or not is a different story.  With 2gb and 3gb of ram on my desktop and laptop respectively I noticed no difference in performance and speed and so the rate of resource consumption is at worst neglligible.

Overall, I’d use RocketDock simply because its FREE and it offers most of the features any average user would need (as average as a user who wants a dock can be).

RocketDock:

http://rocketdock.com/

ObjectDock:

http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/