Windows with WindowBlinds and SoundPackager

Some people are really into the aesthetics of their Windows operating systems. Why not? You might spend hours a day staring at the usually bland, anemic look of Windows XP or Vista. There's no reason to refrain from making it look as interesting or exciting as you please.

Furthermore, the audio that's packaged with those operating systems is equally cold. According to some, the minimal, echo sounds in Vista are actually a step down from the bolder, more authoritative system cues associated with Windows XP.

Stardock doesn't want you to settle for dry looks or off-putting sounds in your Windows OSes. With its latest offerings, you can tweak the visuals and the noises to your heart's content, or download any of the thousands of Windows skins and a handful of prepackaged audio schemes to brighten or darken up the mood of your OS effortlessly.

The familiar WindowBlinds is back is fully compatible with Windows Vista, and it's a dream come true for aesthetic freaks. Meanwhile, the new SoundPackager suffers a bit from first-version syndrome, but it's nevertheless useful to those who are tired of hearing the same old audio bleeps and bloops.

Look of new WindowBlinds

Among its new features are a brand new, much-simpler interface, a font selection panel, animated skinning ability, Vista Sidebar skinning, and a bunch of other checkmarks that bring an amazing amount of value to the relatively inexpensive software.

Of course, as with the previous versions, you can use any of the skins that come with the software or download thousands of other skins, both professional- and user-designed, from Stardock's archives. While many of the skins are truly breathtaking, some that manage to make their way onto the download servers look like they might have been created by toddlers with crayons.

Tweaks you can do with new 'WindowsBlinds'.

The things I like the most and truly are powerful features of WindowBlinds are its on-the-fly customization abilities. No skin is static; you can tweak transparencies, blur, colors, fonts, and more. For example, on the "Colours" page, you can tweak the hue, saturation, and brightness of the colors of your current skin, all while viewing the results in a preview window before committing to the changes.

In the Fonts page of the interface, you can override the skin's chosen system fonts and choose from any fonts installed. On the Transparency & Blur page, you can change the level of blur in the background, behind the transparent parts of the windows, or choose not to blur at all.

The only weak spot is the Sidebar tab. In theory, you can recreate the Vista Sidebar in your own image, but you'll need a decent image editor to do it. If you jump into the Sidebar interface and click "Create a new sidebar skin" on a system lacking Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or whatever, the program tosses you into the Windows photo preview interface. Hardly a powerful editing tool.

WindowBlinds is terrific simply for the sheer number of skins available on Stardock's servers. Many of them don't come with a matching background, so you might end up with mismatched aesthetics if you apply a skin with your current background wallpaper (for instance, a picture of your baby doesn't look great with a harsh techno skin) (or does it?), but finding wallpapers on the Internet is hardly a challenge.

WindowBlinds 6 combines fairly powerful editing options with a wealth of skins that easily makes its asking price negligible. For those who need Windows to look interesting while spending the day slogging through spreadsheets, it's a terrific buy.

Performance

One concern with running a fairly sweeping application in the background all the time is the possibility of performance hits. Does WindowBlinds leverage a performance reduction against the operating system upon which it runs?

Surprisingly, it doesn't.

A minor resource hogging effect was one of the chief complaints with WindowBlinds 5.x. We ran several performance tests, both synthetic, gaming, and real-world encoding and rendering tests, with and without WindowBlinds 6 installed, and the results of each test were so close to identical that we're not even going to bother running charts. To do so would be an exercise in redundancy.

The Sound

Another new Stardock product, SoundPackager, isn't quite as impressive for audio as WindowBlinds is for looks. That's not to say it doesn't have its uses, but it's a first-version piece of software that will doubtlessly receive a huge rush of features over its next few incarnations. If it wasn't so inexpensive, we might recommend waiting until version 2 or 3, but it's a bargain at $20 and it does what it sets out to do.

The idea of SoundPackager is that tweaking Windows sounds is harder than it should be. To do so, you have to find the sound files, replace them with your own sounds created through your own sound editor, point through the Control Panel Sound interface to each new sound file you create, and so on. It is a chore (we've done it more than once), and SoundPackager makes it simpler.