Customize Help

Welcome to Customize Help! Here you’ll find all the info you need to customize your computer. Please note that you can find additional category-specific help pages from a particular category’s browse page (e.g. Icons).

Quick Guide to Customizing

Change the standard Windows theme for a shiny new one! Check out our XP Themes section (see How to Use XP Themes)
Find a new desktop background from our huge selection of Wallpapers (see How to Use Wallpapers)
Get some new Icons for your programs and documents (see How to Use Icons)

Need More Control?

Try using a alternate shell. It replaces your default shell (Explorer) and gives you more options, features, and customization over it. To start out you might want to try some thing easy like bb4win or bbLean. They allow more control over your taskbar, and a right click menu on your desktop for your programs and start menu. And remember always read the ReadMe files, or check the help to learn how to run things properly. Or just if you need an answer to your question, and this doesn’t just apply to using alternate shells.

And when you’re ready for full customization over your shell, AFTER you’ve gained experience and are away from the simpleness of those mentioned shells. You can be introduced to the power of Litestep, but MAKE SURE to read ReadMe’s and Manual’s and all documentation. Otherwise you will fail miserably on your first try with Litestep, almost guaranteed. Check out Litestep Tutorials for more information and help on it.

Also there’s Wiki’s for Litestep and bbLean

Linux Customization

As linux is such a modular operating system, and largely supported by open-source apps, there are countless ways to accomplish the same goals. Nevertheless, there are still a few very common programs used to alter the look and feel of the desktop. If you see something missing, feel free to add it!

Metacity: The standard window manager for Gnome, Metacity is a simple, usable window manager. It lacks many of the more advanced features some of the newer Window Managers support, but typically makes up for it with it’s increased speed.
GTK: The standard gnome widget manager, GTK essentially is responsible for the modification of the aspects of your desktop not controlled by a window manager. This includes buttons, scroll bars, and window interiors.

USE the Power of Google

If you have a question, and the ReadMe file didn’t help you, and you tried to figure it out but failed. Need not worry, and need not jump straight to the forum to ask a extremely simple question that eluded you in the frantic panic for an answer. You simply must learn the power of Google, we all know it and love it, it empowers you to find out answers for yourself, really it does. And ya know what, it doesn’t annoy people because you didn’t try to figure it out yourself, and just decided to post about it. We all were inexperienced once, but through our searching, and learning we grew and became better, and better. And if you too want to become better at customizing or any thing for that matter — do the research.

Some links that might help you are:

Google Guide and
Google Guide’s Cheat Sheet and in case you can’t find it
Selecting Search Terms

Have a More Specific Question?

Feel free to post general questions in the custo group, or browse the groups to find an appropriate place to post.

Help Us

All of our help pages are wiki-powered, see Using Help for details of how to contribute!