Minimalist desktop

I just got the rainmeter program with the enigma skin and it is purely amazing.
The only problem I have now is the windows taskbar.
Is there a theme out there that would make the taskbar be more minimalistic? More simple to match with enigma?


thanks!

 

You'd need some sort of windows theming to tweak desktop and taskbar

cheers ...

 

I know you have to start off with Vista Glazz, its been a while since I changed my Windows theme so cant remember it all.

 

you can set it to auto hide, or maybe thats too minimalistic?

 

Autohide. I set my Windows Taskbar to autohide mode. This is what my minimalist desktop looks like with the taskbar hidden. The jpg is actually also the wallpaper, but there are no icons on the desktop, so it looks the same.

 

lol that is minimalist.

Theres a huge thread about desktop modding in this part of the forum, plenty of idea in there.

 

I always got the impression that minimalist had more to do with white and cleanness. So a white background would have been more suitable in my mind.

 

Well, you could always set your Windows taskbar to Classic, I believe it's a bit thinner, plus the white just looks more minimalistic. And you'll get a nice performance boost (if you're running Vista).

 

I use the small taskbar from this mod: http://ukintel.deviantart.com/art/Thin-Taskbar-Mod-For-Vista-58781683.

Cuts a good 10-20 pixels off the standard.

 

Actually, Minimalist design strips away all that is not essential. As a screen is dark, rather than light, when it is off, dark is more appropriate.

 

If you do the theme patch, I would recommend the "elzo" theme, it's clean and the taskbar is pretty transparent.

 

Great find! I've always put off using the standard aero theme because of the rather thick taskbar.

 

nope, a performance-SHIFT, not a boost. you take work away from the gpu to the cpu. and now guess which is more tailored to handle drawing big quads on screen? re-enable aero, it makes your os happy.

and for the one with the black jpg. on vista, you can choose a "solid color" as a background. why do you have a jpeg instead? minimalistic view possibly, but not minimalistic in the work the os has to do. better switch to a solid single color and take the work off the gpu to render it.

 

Do you know if Ezlo works for 64-bit Vista?

 

Yeah, it's a great mod. The only thing that's not perfect is that the taskbar icons aren't centered in the small bar theme. I don't even notice it anymore, though.

 

It doesn't bother me that much, its the same with other 'small taskbar' theme I've tried.

 

Not to hijack the thread, but it reminds me of a question I have about Windows 7. Isn't one of its features a *larger* taskbar? Why is that useful to people? It seems completely antithetical to how I think about my desktop, which is to want to have as much screen real estate as possible. But maybe I'm missing something?

 

Why are you wasting resources by using a JPG as wallpaper? Just set the background color to black and don't use a wallpaper...

 

How much resource does using a jpg set as a wallpaper use?

 

Actually, I do have it set to a solid color for the background. It is the wallpaper that is the jpg. There is no option to not have a wallpaper; however, it would seem that it would never be used if the option to have a solid background is also selected.

 

Since to display it it gets converted to BMP, 3 bytes per pixel would be my guess...

There is in XP.