Vista ships with eight prebuilt designer color schemes, with Aero being the scheme of choice. You can change to a different designer scheme or invent one all your own. To change color schemes, follow these steps:
1. Right-click any empty part of the Windows desktop and choose Personalize.
The Personalize Appearance and Sounds dialog box appears.
2. Click the Window Color and Appearance icon.
Vista opens the Window Color and Appearance dialog box.
3. If you want to speed up the display on your computer (but zap one of Vista's coolest features), you can deselect the Enable Transparency check box.
If the Enable Transparency check box is grayed out, you either don't have a powerful-enough video card to run the so-called "Glass" interface or you bought the Vista Home Basic edition.
4. Make sure that you click the Show Color Mixer down arrow, and then in the Pick a Color box, click the Default, Graphite, Blue, or Teal icon, or whichever color scheme appeals to you.
You see the Hue, Saturation, Brightness, and Transparency sliders move when you click new color schemes. The eight designer color schemes are just recommendations for specific Transparency, Hue, Saturation, and Brightness settings.
5. Choose one of the prebuilt color schemes, or mix and match your own by moving the Transparency, Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders. When you're done, click the OK button.
Your chosen color scheme takes effect immediately.
If you want to make Vista look a little bit like the older versions of Windows, you can click the Open Classic Appearance Properties for More Color Options link. That opens the old-fashioned Appearance Settings dialog box, which hasn't changed much since the days of Windows 95.
And if you're feeling nostalgic about detailed appearance settings for old-fashioned programs and a few backwater Windows utilities, you can click the Advanced button in the Appearance Settings dialog box. The Advanced settings there haven't changed much since Windows 3.1. Vista doesn't warn you about one key feature of these advanced settings: Everything here is virtually obsolete. You can make all the changes you want, but you will see very little effect in Vista itself.
