James Bannan15 August 2006, 4:41 AM
Do the animations in Windows Vista make you feel half-drunk or motion sick? Do the overcluttered Explorer windows confuse the hell out of you when you're hunting for a file in a hurry? Here's how to strip back Vista to rid it of the eyecandy.
Without a doubt, Vista's #1 talked-about feature is its "Aero Glass" interface: those semi-translucent windows that swoop and swoosh across the screen with giddying frequency.
It is a very different interface when compared to previous versions of Windows, and it tends to have a polarising impact on people who've used it.
Personally, I believe that Vista’s Aero Glass theme looks great, but there’s no way I’m living with it as is.
At the risk of being drowned in hate mail yet again, I’ll venture forth the opinion that this is one the major benefits of Windows over any other operating system out there - it’s incredibly customisable.
Gnome, KDE and OSX are all great interfaces and I’m not knocking them, but they have all the flexibility of America’s foreign policy. They’re good because they have to be - you’re pretty much stuck with them as they appear.
Windows, on the other hand, doesn’t have to look amazing out of the box - there are thousands of ways to make your computer look like either something out of an Anne Rice novel or like a Japanese manga artist’s bubblegum-and-LSD-fuelled mind haze. Or a happy combination of both.
Modifying Aero Glass
Right-click on the Vista desktop and select Personalize. This takes you to the Personalization panel, also accessible through Control Panel, Appearance and Personalization.
Click on Window Color and Appearance and you get a window new to Vista which gives you some basic control over the Glass effects. If you don’t like transparency (and to be honest it’s a little disconcerting…makes you feel half-drunk after a while), then either dial the transparency level up until the borders are almost opaque or disable it completely.
Disabling transparency gives the system a performance boost as well - always useful. For some customised colour, expand the “Show color mixer” dialogue and go crazy.
Select “Open classic appearance properties for more color options”, and you get the old Appearance Settings options - the same from the Appearance tab under Display Properties in Windows XP.
There are all the old colour schemes available, so if you want to strip the visual impact right back, choose Windows Standard (or Classic) and revel in that old Windows 2000 look. Even though it really does look dreadful…
Go into Advanced and customise any aspect of the windows - fonts, border thickness and colour and so on. These features are completely unchanged from any other version of Windows, but being able to modify the Aero Glass effects keeps them relevant.
Windows Explorer
With its focus on metadata, tags and content, the Explorer experience in Vista takes some getting used to. In my last post, Vista: Ultimate Confusing Mess Edition, I talked about how Windows users really couldn’t care less about metadata in general. They’re certainly not interested in having to add it all manually.
That’s one thing which I think Microsoft might have underestimated. The way in which we work with files and folders is the same way we’ve been doing it since Windows 95. That’s eleven years of inertia to overcome. Of course Microsoft has to start making changes somewhere, but I don’t think Vista is the OS to revolutionise the way we do things.
So, any self-respecting Vista user is probably going to jump straight into the Control Panel, switch on Classic View, and click into Folder Options. Want that metadata out of your life? Select “Use Windows classic folders” and that annoying footer on each folder view is history. Click into View and you’ve got a swathe of options to choose from including my personal favourite - “Always show menus”.
And once you’ve got the classic folders enabled, you can expand the folder pane view so that you actually know where you are now, change the view from Medium Icons to Details, then jump back into Folder Options and apply those changes across the board. And you’re left with a Windows Explorer you can actually work with.
It’s All Good
To be honest, I don’t know a single Windows user who, given the choice, has left their visual settings at factory default. This isn’t because the factory defaults are terrible, but because we all love to personalise, to brand something as our own. It gives a sense of ownership…it’s almost territorial in that respect (and changing your wallpaper and theme is more socially acceptable than urinating on your computer).
Don’t get hung up about Aero. If you don’t like it just scrap it. And if you think Windows Explorer is confusing and frustrating, turn it back to the way it was. Nothing’s stopping you. Personally, I prefer to think of the default Vista interface as a demonstration of what the OS can achieve, rather than a love-it-or-hate-it product. I neither love it nor hate it, but I applaud the efforts which have gone into making it. And then I’ll make it do what I want it to…