Winbubbles - Vista Customization

With so many readers now using Windows Vista I thought it was about time that I focused on a fantastic little program that I've had on my hard drive for several months now called 'Winbubbles'. This application is designed to help you quickly and easily customize your Vista installation by way of a small 350kb freeware download.

The URL to download the application directly is to long to easily print in this article so you are best of doing a search for it yourself; the quickest way I can suggest is to head to www.freewarefiles.com and do a search for Winbubbles or otherwise a quick Google search will locate it for you. After installing the application you will be able to customize pretty much any aspect of your Vista installation, including the following:

Windows Customizations:

- Enable Aurora Bootscreen guide - This will allow you to switch the boring old black Windows start-up screen for something a little more appealing.

· Add/Edit OEM Logo and information (this appears in system properties) as well as owners information

· Context Menu Customizations such as Move To, Copy To, Disk Clean-up options

· New screensaver properties, including options for the Windows Bubble screensaver which ordinarily has no user configurable settings.

- Alter system icons ' This allows you to remove the arrow normally present on shortcut icons.

- Add/Remove IE, Computer, Network, Control Panel, Public Folder icons from Desktop.

General Improvements:

· Speed-up Start menu search

- The ability to turn Windows Aero on/off with ease ' Handy if you wish to simplify the enhanced visual effects that come with Vista, this can help both boost performance and laptop battery life.

· Clear Multiple Monitor Configuration

Security:

- Disable access to sensitive functionality ' Another handy feature is the ability to restrict access to areas like Task Manager, Autoplay, access to the control panel to mention a few. Handy if children or fairly public access to your machine and you want to limit the amount they can manipulate and access.

- Add Encrypt/Decrypt to Explorer´s Context Menu (accessed by right clicking) ' An easy way to add security to sensitive files.

· Enable/Disable UAC - Quickly and easily allows you to turn off or on the User Account Control which pops up every time Windows detects you, or an application on your computer is trying to change a system setting; I personally turned this off the second I installed Vista.

- Disable the RUN command in Windows Start Menu and Task manager

· Hide ALL, or specific drives on your PC - Useful if you want to restrict users access to files and drives on a public computer.

This list is not complete by any stretch of the imagination there are many other parts of Windows Vista that can be personalized using this programme ' the above is more of a selection of my favourites. Even though Winbubbles add anything to the installation, it does however make the process of customizing your computer a lot easier and a lot more accessible to the average computer user and as such is certainly worth a go. Please note that this application is only compatible with Windows Vista, although there are dozens of similar applications already released for Windows XP such as Tweak UI which can be downloaded free of charge, again from the website www.freewarefiles.com

About The Author Chris Holgate writes a weekly article of all things tech related. He is a director and copyrighter of the online computer consumables business Refresh Cartridges who sell cheap ink cartridges, toner cartridges, computer hardware and other computer consumables online. An archive of his work can be found at www.computerarticles.co.uk.