The look of the Windows Vista Sidebar is a little drab, and there’s no way to customize it with the default tools in Vista. Thankfully third party developers have stepped up to the plate and created an application that will let you re-theme the sidebar.
Note: After installing and launching this application you will need to restart the Vista sidebar.
When you launch the Windows Sidebar Styler application, it will give you this dialog that gives you a list of all the elements in the theme. You can select the items and see a preview on the right.
The big Play button will apply the style, but first you’ll need to load it by clicking the button to the right for “Load a Windows Sidebar Style”, which will open up a file selection dialog so you can choose from the different themes.
There’s a bunch of themes that come with the application, or you can find more themes at the WinCustomize gallery.
If you click the More button on the dialog, you can even select an option to make the sidebar resizable.
Once you select that option, you can resize the sidebar like any other window. You’ll notice a new option to “Lock” the sidebar, which will prevent resizing once you’ve chosen the size that you want.
Another benefit to this tool is that you can load more powerful gadgets utilizing WPF (Windows Presentation Framework).
Download Windows Sidebar Styler from stoyanoff.info
If you find yourself using the Group Policy Editor all the time, you might have wondered why it doesn’t show up in the Control Panel along with all the other tools. After many hours of registry hacking, I’ve come up with a registry tweak to let you do just that.
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
If you’re like most PC users you have thousands of files all over your computer in different directories. When it comes time to do maintenance on your PC and clean up some of those files you probably don’t remember what is what. In fact I know myself that I will download a bunch of utility
Scott pointed me in the direction of an interesting utility for Windows XP that will let you “skin” your icons by replacing the built-in folder icons with custom icons, and even assign a different color for different folders.
We’ve all been at our computer when the Windows Update dialog pops up and tells us to reboot our computer. I’ve become convinced that this dialog has been designed to detect when we are most busy and only prompt us at that moment.
I’ve been getting emails left and right from readers complaining that their Music folder icon has turned from the default shiny icon into the generic yellow folder icon. After doing some research I finally have a workaround for this issue.
Driver problems are a source of never-ending issues in the Windows world. Often you’ll have a working driver on another machine, but don’t have the installation cd anymore to install on the new computer.
I’ve received a number of emails from readers telling me that their computer has no option for “Show Hidden Files and Folders” in the Folder Options dialog. The question even showed up on the forum, where Scott promptly found a registry tweak which I’m sharing with everybody.
If you are running Ubuntu and want to use the Tomcat servlet container, you should not use the version from the repositories as it just doesn’t work correctly. Instead you’ll need to use the manual installation process that I’m outlining here.
Has this ever happened to you? I created a new virtual machine running Ubuntu on my VMware server before I left home, but forgot to install the ssh server… so I couldn’t get to that machine at all from my remote location. Rather than driving back home I decided to find a solution.
