In my random searching I found this post on Life Hacker about some cool desktop customizations.  Being the adventurious/curious person taht I am I decided to play with a few of these.  I find the idea of customizing your computer to be facinating.  It’s wonderful that you can show you indiviuality on your computer.  I do warn you that it is easy to get lost in the complicated nature of customizing your desktop.  There are several programs out there few of them are as easy as sites say they are.  Most of these customizations will cause instability so play with caution.

I installed all of the programs from this blog (along with a few others) and here what I am left with.

Launchy (http://www.launchy.net/)

This is an amazing program.  Perhaps the only program from that list that I use everyday.  This program indexes your start menu.  You simple launch the program, type in a few letters, find your selection and press enter.  No need for the mouse.  I set my shortcut keys to be ctl+space so with a quick key stroke I can open any program, favorite website or google search.  When I’m not using it, it’s invisible.  I’ve only barley touched on the functinoality but the pay off is huge.  This is defenatly one of those programs that you must use.  Easy to setup and configure and extemely easy to use.

Start Killer (http://www.tordex.com/startkiller/)

This program works hand in hand with Launchy.  It removes the Start button from the taskbar giving yo back vital space for all of the programs you have open.  With Launch, there is no ready for a start menu or qucik launch bar.  Mine are both gone.  This is a lite program with no configuration.  Just install and go.

Themes and custom backgrounds.

If you are adventurous, you can go into the world of custom theme.  This takes a little more courage as you have to alter the windows theme system file to use cutom themes in MS Windows.  If you wish to venture into custom themes then see this site for details on how to setup Windows.  Feel free to contact me for help.

Once you have patched Windows, then you can do some amazing stuff.  There are several sites that have free themes to download including WinCustomize and ThemeWorld.

If you are not as adventurous, then you can still add some customiziblity but chaning your background image and screen saver.

No Matter what you do, remember to make it your own.

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