PaulSpoerry.com

I’ve been a long time customizer of the Windows interface. Windows XP always looked like it was designed by a team from Fischer Price (hey, it’s “My First PC!”). Vista is of course much better looking in the visual department but there are still tons of GUI customizations out there that many people prefer. If you want to change the way Windows looks, then get a copy of WindowBlinds by StarDock. A WindowBlinds skin can make Windows look like an alternative operating system, like their favorite sports or car brand, or something completely new. Because WindowBlinds uses the latest hardware acceleration features of modern video cards, WindowBlinds won’t slow down your computer and uses very little memory. (btw… StarDock’s entire suite, called Object Desktop is awesome).

If you’re using Vista with a WindowBlinds skin what’s lacking is customizing the Windows Vista SideBar. The Sidebar of course allows you to run those (sometimes) handy Gadgets on the side of your screen.

Enter Stanimir Stoyanov who has create a very useful application that automates customizing the appearance of the Windows Vista sidebar. If you change your skin and want your sidebar to match, Windows Sidebar Styler makes it very easy to change the look.

1. Visit Stanimir Stoyanov’s blog and download the latest version.
2. Once installed, start up the Windows Sidebar Styler. You can find it in the start menu under Stanimir Stoyanov.
3. You can replace individual graphics used to create a custom theme by scrolling through the Available Resource List, right clicking on a resource and selecting Replace.

   

   Alternatively, you open a theme that was already created by clicking on the open button that is just to the right of the big Apply/Play button.

   

4. Once you have your changes made or theme loaded, hit the big Apply/Play button and you are finished.

   

Looking for more Windows Sidebar Styler themes to download? Check out WinCustomize.

I’m a customizer. I love Windowsblinds, I’ve used all kinds of sidebar applications like SysMetrix, Desktop Sidebar, etc. When I first heard about Vista including a side bar I was pretty excited… then I loaded some system monitoring gadgets and it all went downhill. Perhaps it’s the fault of the gadget creators themselves and not Vista Sidebar, but that thing ate up some serious resources. My laptop is getting older (Dell XPS Gen2, 2.0Ghz, 2g RAM) so for the longest time I didn’t bother running the sidebar. After some discussions with a co-worker I decided to play with it again and loaded it up with some gadgets. Suddenly, it wouldn’t load or it would load but there would be no gadgets and Task Manager would report it continually gobbling up memory. I have no idea if it was a specific gadget that caused the problem I just knew I wanted it fixed.

The Sidebar Properties window has an option to restore the default Vista gadgets, but it was greyed out. No love there.

Unable to use the default method for restoring the defaults I set out to try and fix it manually. Here’s the steps I took:

1. Open task manager and kill any sidebar.exe process that might be running.
2. Open Explorer and browse to C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar (where <user name> is the user you log into Vista with).
3. Open Settings.ini, hit CTRL-A (select all) and hit delete. The file is now empty. Save the file.
4. Browse into the Gadgets directory.
5. Select CTRL-A (select all) and delete them. (Note: I couldn’t delete ALL of the gadgets the first try. If that happens reboot and try to delete them again… after the reboot you should be able to delete them all).
6. Restart Windows Sidebar.

Everything should load successfully now. You should see the default Sidebar with the clock, wallpaper thingy, and RSS feed. For some odd reason the “restore defaults” button is still greyed out… go figure.

Now that it’s back will I give Sidebar another shot? Probably. I love to tweak my system and I can think of a few gadgets I’d love to have always on access to… I’ll probably still shy away from the resource meters as I suspect they were causing the excess cpu cycles.