Winbubbles - Easy Vista Customization

Many of my readers now seem to have converted to Vista so I thought it was about time I let you in on a lovely little application I came across and have been using for ages entitled 'Winbubbles'. This program is designed to help you quickly and easily customize Windows 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 change the drab black Windows bootup screen to something a lot more interesting.

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

- Context Menu ' You can customize available options such as Move To, Copy To, Disk Clean-up options.

- Added screensaver properties - These include options for the Windows Bubble screensaver that do not normally have customisable settings.

· Alter system icons including removing the arrow on shortcut icons

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

General Improvements:

- Optimised Start menu search

· Easily deactivate and reactivate Windows Aero - This can be useful if you want to tone down the graphical effects new in Vista, for example to increase performance or 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 Right-Click Menu (Context Menu) - Allows you to quickly and easily protect any sensitive files.

- Enable/Disable UAC ' Allows the quick and easy diabling of the User Account Control that shows up each time Windows finds an application that is attempting to change a system setting; although you can disable this with a standard Vista installation.

· Disable RUN command in the 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