Eyecandy

Last night, I finished messing with my desktop. Here is screenshot. So here's how I did it. First, the background is called Lightning at Sunset. Google it, and its posted on Flickr. The white text in the lower right corner is from something called Samurize. There is a good article on Lifehacker.com on how to use it. It tells me time, uptime, battery level, wifi IP, LAN IP, and date. It can do a lot of other stuff, but that is all I am using. You can also post text files with it, so to the left of all of that is my todo.txt. The top dock is RocketDock with a lot of custom icons. The only gadget I am running is called Multimeter. It reads RAM used and both cores' usage level. I actually use this a lot. I am also running ObjectDock on the right with the Weather docklet and a link to the recycle bin. I decided I liked more of a minimalist look and wanted to get rid of as many icons as I could. That is what RocketDock was for. You can probably guess what most of the programs on there are, but I'll list them just for the heck of it. from left to right: link to script that automatically safely removes my external HDD, link to script that automatically safley removes my flash drive, folder with my school stuff in it, my user folder, My Computer, folder with a bunch of tools in it (I'll go over those on a later post), Tunebite, Ruckus, Finale 2007, Autodesk Inventor Pro 2009, MATLAB, Rainbow 6 vegas, Bioshock, Spore, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, Portal, Half Life 2 episode 1, Half Life 2 Episode 2, Steam, Link to internet radio station that plays piano jazz all the time (I love piano jazz, good for when you need to relax), virtual box, motorola phone tools, Skype, Firefox, Word. These are all of the programs I use most.
Aside from changing the look, I also changed the sound. I changed my logon, logoff, and startup sounds to sound themes from Mandriva Linux. These are all really easy to change, just go to control panel, sounds. However, the startup sound is not easy to change. For some reason, Microsoft really didn't want you to mess with it. But, it is possible, and here is how. I am posting this so readers can do it, and so I don't forget (because I had changed it before, and then I forgot how to and it took me a while to figure it out again). First, download Reshacker. its a standalone exe. right click it and run it as administrator. Then, go to open, and navigate to C:/Windows/System32 and open imageres.dll. expand WAVE and 5051, and click on 1033. If you click play, you should hear the vista startup sound. Next, right click on 1033 and click replace resource. navigate to your new sound and click ok. then fill in the boxes with WAVE, 5051, and 1033 respectively. Click ok, and then click play again, and you should hear your new sound. Now save it as imageres2.dll in C:/Windows/System32. Now, go to start, type cmd in the search bar, and right click, run as administrator. Type
net user administrator /active:yes
and hit enter.
you just enabled logging in to the administrator account. Now, go to switch user and log in as administrator. Navigate to C:/Windows/System32. Find imageres.dll. Rename it as imageres_backup.dll and rename imageres2.dll to imageres.dll. Now logout as administrator and log back in as your username. Open cmd as administrator again and type
net user administrator /active:no
and hit enter. So what you just did was replace the original system file with your modified one. You have to log in as administrator because permissions for system files are tight and I couldn't get my user the right privileges no matter what I did. You should not log in as administrator except for maintenance things like we just did. Staying logged in and using it as your normal account is a bad idea for the same reason that logging in as root all the time in linux is a bad idea. If you screw something up as administrator, it is a lot harder to fix. Anyway, restart and you should be good. If you are looking for some cool sounds, I suggest here.

Good luck, and enjoy your new sounds.