|
|
WindowBlinds
Customize the look and feel of Windows XP with
WindowBlinds. It's a Windows utility that enables users to
personalize nearly every aspect of the Windows graphical user
interface. It can "skin" your title bars, push buttons, Start bar,
radio buttons, and nearly every other part of Windows. There are
thousands of freely available skins to choose from. Use
WindowBlinds to make Windows look like another operating system
(Mac, Linux, etc.) or give it your own unique look and feel. You
can also create your own skins using the freely available
SkinStudio. WindowBlinds eliminates the need for any stay-resident
program making it use virtually no extra memory. It also makes use
of hardware acceleration found on most nVidia and ATI cards
resulting in an overall performance increase.
Despite a few issues, WindowBlinds offers a compelling way to add
some panache to Windows XP. In short, the program lets you skin
Windows, offering a number of preconfigured themes that range in
styles and change the entire look of your desktop. No matter what
skin you choose, though, we doubt you'll have any complaints with
the appearance of the polished, attractive themes. You also choose
from several toolbar icon sets to match your skin of choice and
tweak settings such as the size of the taskbar. WindowBlinds gets
high marks for performance; we found the skins loaded seamlessly
after a couple of seconds. However, we should note that the
program takes up its fair share of RAM--65MB on our test machine.
If you want to edit the themes through the program, you'll have to
install the publisher's SkinStudio, and we missed the ability to
reassociate a wallpaper image of our choice with our selected
themes. On the plus side, the trial version lets you test the
program for a full two months, which is very generous by today's
standards. Anyone who sits in front of a computer all day will
find that WindowBlinds helps liven up the experience.
Download
back |
