Looking to restyle your desktop? Treat yourself to a classic look with the Pantheon suite from Stardock Design andacclaimed skinner Essorant . This elegant suite consists of everything you need to transform your windows desktop, including: Dramatic visual style Stylish icons Matching wallpaper New logon and boot screens Clock, calendar and weather gadgets You can transform your entire desktop and see Windows in a whole new way for a mere $8.95 ($7.95 for Object Desktop subsc...

March 17th is St. Patrick's day, a day most often commemorated by corned beef and cabbage, green beer, short little red-headed guys with funny hats and all sorts of people wearing buttons that say "Kiss me, I'm Irish!"  Well, we thought it might be fun to get into the spirit of the upcoming holiday here at WinCustomize with a mini-contest of sorts, something to get everyone thinking a little more "green".  Here's what you have to do to participate: Create five St. Patrick's Day t...

The retail electronics space is about to get a lot less competitive.  CompUSA announced yesterday that it is set to close more than half of its US retail locations within the next 3 months, dropping expensive and low-performing locations to focus in on their top performing stores.  After closing 126 locations, CompUSA will receive a $440 million cash infusion from an unknown source.  This is all part of a major cost-cutting and restructuring effort for the electronics retailer. ...

Users of the incredibly useful Google Maps service probably noticed a new button added to the interface recently.  Previously only available via the mobile client, desktop users now have access to a "Traffic" button that will draw an overlay on roads indicating their current traffic load.  Green means that traffic is moving at least 50 miles per hour or higher, yellow is 25 - 50 miles per hour, red is less than 25 miles per hour, and gray indicates there's no data available. Of cour...

With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 and the radical UI changes brought with the new ribbon interface, it looks like there's an opening for competition in the office productivity space to gain some ground against the Redmond giant.  Corel, owners of the WordPerfect suite is jumping into the fray with both feet this week with the release of the beta version of their flagship word processor. The WordPerfect Lightning beta is free to download and offers a new degree of online services...

Imagine you walk into a McDonalds and instead of swiping a credit card, or handing over cash, you use your cell phone to place and pay for the order.  Seem a little far-fetched and silly?  Well, NTT DoCoMo and McDonalds don't think so as it's a new service they're planning to roll out in the near future.  Already in Japan, and the UK consumers can purchase items like train tickets via their cell phones.  It's the next step in making ordering and paying for services and pr...

Google offers a wide assortment of free tools to users ranging from email, to calendaring, to instant messaging and office productivity apps.  Basically, you have access to all the tools necessary to manage your day-to-day life and work with ease.  Well, it would be easy if the applications were actually integrated seamlessly together, but at this time, they aren't.  Google Mail and Google Calendar work together sort of, but the integration isn't all that smooth.  Other piece...

Since the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000/2001, the looming specter hovering over the shoulder of the common IT worker has been "outsourcing."  Or at least that's the boogieman the media has chosen to hoist up to scare everyone into thinking their jobs are doomed to be taken away by someone in India making a mere fraction of their current salary.  But if you listen to Bill Gates, richest man on the planet and the mover/shaker behind Microsoft and it's meteoric rise to becoming o...

Some of you who purchased Dark Avatar opted to have a CD shipped to you as well as having the game available for digital distribution via Stardock Central.  For those who have the physical media and want something cool to stick on your games shelf, I'd like to offer you the slimline DVD case cover designed by Paul Boyer. This cover was used in the media kits we sent to gaming sites and magazines looking to preview and review Dark Avatar.  So now you can print this out, slide it i...

One of the biggest frustrations with installing a new operating system is finding, downloading and installing all the various device drivers you need to work the gizmos and doodads in your PC.  Most support websites are difficult to navigate, as if they're intentionally trying to hide the drivers from you, making you sift through dozens of menus and links to get to the software that will power your peripherals and expansion cards. In response to this, a site has stepped up with an up-to-...

Giving us our second perfect score are the wonderful folks over at SciFi.com.  Matt Peckham penned the review, giving us an "A+" and essentially saying Dark Avatar further cements Galactic Civilizations II as the top-dog in the turn-based strategy market, the name to beat now that Master of Orion has been soundly beaten. Perhaps the most interesting part of the review comes in an aside at the very end from the author on the subject of multiplayer gaming in turn-based strategy games: ...

Last week we mentioned that Microsoft was backing away from sales forecasts that it's now calling "aggressive" for Windows Vista through 2008.  A lot of people marked slow sales up to a combination of hardware and software support lagging, and the lack of compelling reasons to move away from Windows XP considering how stable of an OS it has become in the last 5 years.  However, it seems Microsoft sees the issue a bit differently. In the same call last week with analysts saying t...

Remember when Microsoft analysts were claiming that Windows Vista sales were going to be spectacular and spark massive growth in the industry because consumers would be falling over themselves to upgrade?  Well, turns out those forecasts were a little bit too aggressive.  Now though, Microsoft itself is admitting just that.  CEO Steve Ballmer said as much yesterday in a strategy presentation to analysts, saying that Vista would create a "small surge" in PC sales in fiscal 2008. ...

The reviews keep coming in, and Dark Avatar shows no signs of slowing down or slipping on the ratings chart!  Our latest review comes from UGO.com and writer Adam Swiderski.  The tagline for the review on the front page of their gaming section reads: The best turn-based strategy game around gets even better. If that doesn't give you a good idea of how well we fared in the review, here's a little blurb from the article itself: Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is gre...

We often lean heavily on the members of our community to help each other out in learning how to use software like SkinStudio, IconDeveloper and DesktopX.  They're not easy tools and require a fair bit of invested time to really get a feel for how to get them to do what you want.  DesktopX is probably one of the most difficult creation tools since it requires both coding and graphics skill. After numerous tutorials on the subject, community member, and gadget guru, RomanDA is steppi...