Add a little bit of magic to your desktop with the Abracadabra Suite created by long-time skinner, and community member Treetog , for Stardock Design ! Updated from the classic Pixtudio suite, this new edition takes full advantage of WindowBlinds 5 to give your desktop a magical look and feel. This colossal suite comes packed with everything you need to completely overhaul your Windows desktop with a vibrant visual style, matching icons, cursors, logon screen, wallpaper and app...
In the world of Web 2.0, the mob is where the power and intelligence is. At least that's the theory behind sites like social bookmarking site Digg.com and crowd-written encyclopedia Wikipedia. The idea is that given enough eyes looking at something, the real value and truth will float to the top. This works great so long as you're on the good side of the mob. Microsoft, as a rule, tends to be on the wrong side of the mob, the one where the pitchforks and torches are point...
In 1995, lines formed outside of stores opening at midnight to sell frenzied customers copies of the the next big thing in home computing... Windows 95. By all accounts, it was a rock star event, the launch of what really took Microsoft into the dominant OS position it's in today. That was almost twelve years ago, and now Microsoft is poised to launch its latest Windows product, which it is trying to sell as as big a technological change as the one seen from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95...
Yesterday, word came down from Microsoft that nearly a quarter of all Windows installs world-wide were classified as "non-genuine" by the Windows Genuine Advantage tool which checks license validity. Since it's launch in 2005, the system has attempted to validate 512 million users, and tagged 22.3% as invalid. That's 114,176,000 pirated copies out there in the wild according to Microsoft's statistics. The WGA program has come under heavy fire due to the system mislabling valid ins...
Our month-long series, Touring Windows Vista, has finally reached its conclusion. Over the past four weeks we've looked at the new UI, the Start Menu, the changes to the control panels and bundled applications, as well as the buried goodies for Power Users to play with. All-told, if you printed the series out you'd end up with about 14 pages of text, and even at that length I didn't begin to scratch the surface of what's going on with Vista. Today, I've posted my wrap-up and c...
Game of the Year awards continue to trickle out as we pass safely into the 2007 gaming season. Today, we move on to GameShark and their picks for 2006. We received two nods of recognition this year. PC Game of the Year Runner-Up. We made it to the final round and were up against PC gaming heavyweights such as Bethesda's Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Monolith's F.E.A.R: Extraction Point, Civilization 4: Warlords from Firaxis, and the ultimate winner of this year's PC ...
Forget those slackers of Generation X, and those confused kids caught in between in Generation Y, we've moved on to a completely new generation now, and it's being called "Generation We". Now, I know, you're thinking that's a name so dumb you wouldn't even expect Nintendo to use it for a product. But no dear friends and readers of WinCustomize, I kid you not. Generation X was characterized by a sort of nameless, lack of identity following the Baby Boomer generation, abandoni...
Windows Vista, with its migration to DirectX10, will remove the hardware abstraction layer for sound. The impact is that older games which use Direct Sound, and older sound cards will not deliver the same level of sound quality under Vista as they would under XP. Creative, in an attempt to limit the impact on consumers, will be releasing an application called Alchemy which will auto-detect Direct Sound games and bypass the Vista sound system, restoring the lost audio quality. More...
Today we have two new previews of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar to point you to. With the release of the expansion drawing ever closer, the press is really ramping up and sharing their first thoughts on how the game is shaping up. The first preview is for you French-speaking folk. HardGamers.com , a prominent French-language gaming website has posted a preview. Second, for our English-speaking fans, comes a preview from our friends over at GameSpy . Allen 'Dels...
InfoWorld is reporting that starting January 30th, you'll be able to purchase a copy of Microsoft Windows online, download it to your PC and install it without ever going to a store to get a DVD. The Windows Marketplace site, the new digital storefront being pushed as part of Microsoft's huge Live suite of products and services, already allows users to purchase and download software and games, where registrations are stored for users in their own Digital Locker. Microsoft Office 2...
The RIAA doesn't think there's any real demand for legal digitally downloadable music, at least that was their stance for years. Their view was that people who actually wanted to purchase music would want the CD. They resisted the change at every turn, until they finally had no choice... either do digital sales of have no growing market at all. 2006 saw sales of digital music nearly double over the previous year, reaching the $2 billion mark, or 10% of all music sales. This ...
In keeping with the recent tradition for less than interesting names for their server OS products, it looks like the next version of Windows Server will drop the long-used codename "Longhorn" and merely pick up a year designation when it goes RTM. Windows Server 2007 joins the line of server products starting with Windows Server 2000 and more recently updated with Windows Server 2003. While pretty boring and unoriginal, I'm sure it won't get quite the media razzing the consumer l...
Back at the start of the month, I asked users if they would be interested in contributing to WinCustomize by writing articles to be featured in our articles section. Several of you immediately volunteered yourselves for whatever mad-scientist like project I was brewing deep in the dark corners of my mind, and that is very much appreciated. For responses, it was a relatively even split. We received 146 votes in total, with 54% of you saying you'd be willing to toss in your two cen...
Today we've posted the penultimate installment in the Touring Windows Vista article series. This week we look at tools for the power user, and how Vista gives users a lot more information on what their system is doing and how it is performing than previous iterations of Windows. The article focuses in on the Performance & Monitoring Tools in the Vista Control Panel and covers items like the improved event log, as well as detailed hardware monitors. If you're at all interested in ...
Today marks the launch of the WC2k7 website. The new site is just packed with new stuff as well as improvements to older features. To make sure everyone gets the most out of the new tools we've included, this article is a brief tutorial familiarizing you with some of the more useful bits. 1. Breadcrumbs WinCustomize is big. I mean really big. It's kind of mind-boggling when you come to realize just how big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way d...