Basic Aero style tweaks

Having discovered another half-baked aspect of Windows Vista -- the fact you can't customize anything worthwhile in the Aero themes -- I'm wondering if anyone can point me somewhere that tells me either how to manually fiddle with the msstyles file or some software that enables me to do it.

I've googled but all my results seems to be a tangle of weird Vista themes apparently created by bored and mentally deficient highschool kids.

I don't want to insall someone elses custom Vista themes. I don't want to make maximized windows transparent. All I want to do is change a couple of window border colors so I don't have to put up with the MS "baby blue" clashing with the gray Aero theme eveywhere.

 

Vista is not half baked, may be your computer is. To change color, right click > personalize > Windows color and appearance.

 

Yes, I got there... but in Aero none of the "advanced" windows customization options in the "Classic Appearance Settings" will have any effect. That's a fairly well known issue from what I've read. So I can select the basic Aero color/intensity/etc. but cannot change things like the title bar colors etc. That's what I'm trying to do.

I currently have the gray Aero color scheme but all application windows still have their regular baby blue title and tool bar borders within the gray glass wrapping and the active window highlight is a weird fluroescent blue. Me don't like and want to know if I can change this.

 

What you're describing sounds a little strange - care for a screenshot?

 

Screenshot of an example attached... wanna be able to change the color of the title bars and (in this case) toolbars. Am I being dumb?!

 

I don't have that menu bar you have shown. It cannot be changed to a different color. The color changes affect only window borders, not menu bars.

 

Yeah, I enabled menu bars... but the same color is applied to title bars etc., so the result is that you have the nice gray glass window and then ugly blue title bars, menu bars, button highlights, window highlights etc.

The colors of many of those elements could be changed in XP (using the same advanced appearance settings in my screenshot), but not apparently in Vista Aero. Hence this thread -- is there a way to change them in Aero by tweaking files manually or using software? I'm basically looking to create a slightly modified Aero Gray theme.

 

Well, try VistaGlazz + http://www.deviantart.com/#catpath=customization/skins/vistautil/visstyles&order=9

 

that's just what I don't want to do -- every custom theme I've seen is way over the top for me and few, if any, give any indication of what the colors of smaller theme elements actually are.

I just want to change a couple of element colors and am wondering if there's a straightforward way of doing that by editing style files or similar.

 

A lot of the elements you have to change by editing the msstyles sheet.

 

sounds like what I want to do... where do I find the msstyle file and what format is it in (will I need software to edit it or is it text-based, like XML or css)?

 

It's text based but it takes a serious learning curve. There are a few tutorials if you hit up Google. Good Luck

 

Yeah, sounds like that half-baked aspect of linux - I can't turn it into Windows.

 

interestingly, that's the old dialog for the pre aero, and even pre xp-theme days. for those that want to tweak the win95style look.

who ever wants to do that

 

That's one reason I describe Vista as half-baked... dig deep in the menu and you run into options I first played with in Win95. Vista has all sorts of weird stuff like this that you'd think would've been updated or at least presented differently, especially with MS touting Vista as redesigned from the bottom up. Yeah right.

 

People (administrators, mostly) complain when the deep-down system stuff looks and operates different. It might look the same but under it is new stuff.

Vista is redesigned. Just because you don't see it, well. It's not trendy to bash Vista anymore unless you have valid points. There were quite a few at launch. Now it's real hard to come up with some.

 

That's not half-baked, that's called "legacy support" for "enterprise customers" - the folks who actually pay for Microsoft's bread and butter. You didn't think Microsoft lived or died on the number of OS copies it sold to individual consumer users, did you?

That being said, the fact that this stuff has to remain within the guts of the OS - the proverbial way that red meat is supposed to stay in the intestines forever - is a good object lesson in the false economies realized by trying to invent a one-size-fits-all monolithic (or semi-mono, depending on your OS architecture philosophy) OS for a spectrum of users that runs from one individual running one copy on one machine in isolation all the way up to thousand-unit enterprises in a corporate domain running thin clients.

However, with Win 7, at least some of this nonsense should start to get weeded out as legacy support moves to virtualization as opposed to being hard-coded in the OS itself.

 

while i fully agree with you, if it would work (and it sometimes does), it would be very flexible.. and the base of the os should be the same, that is independent on what it's used for. win7 is a step in the right direction, it changes it's behavior quite a bit, if joined to a domain.

the biggest weed out will be after win7. virtualization can only go so far (and is not, as people think, a holy grail, for backwards compatibility. while it works, it works only at a very high cost.

THE ONE biggest thing for fixing this "nonsense" is, they made counters for everything in the os, on how often stuff gets used, and how and what for exactly. this gets reported back, if the user accepts for the "customer feedback for usability improvement" program (i don't know it's name anymore).

this data (and that's why everyone should agree to that program) gets then feed into the development for win8, 9 etc. so they can learn, what components aren't used often, and start to weed that old crap out.

 

You are being pretty dumb lol.. It doesnt take rocket appliances to figure out that everything in the aero, and basic style is images.

 

No one found it ironic that the user calls for a complete update of the system yet laments the loss of legacy interface customization controls.