You can be even more specific about System Tray conduct by configuring actions on just the icons of your choosing. If you’re following along from the preceding section, just click the Customize button from the Notification Area tab of the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box.
Otherwise, right-click an empty area of the System Tray and choose the Customize Notification Icons menu item. Either way, you’ll see the dialog box shown in Figure 4-17.
Figure 4-17. Customizing individual System Tray icon behavior
To configure icon behavior, just select one of the items in the list. The Behavior column then becomes a drop-down list where the options are as follows:
Hide
Show
Hide when inactive
Current items are the ones loaded at the time you open this dialog box. Past items were at one time loaded in the System Tray, and may yet be loaded again. For example, if you don’t want to see the Windows Task Manager icon in the System Tray the next time you use this utility, choose it from your Past Items list, and then choose the Hide option.
Again, it’s worth pointing out that just because you don’t see an icon in the System Tray doesn’t mean the application hasn’t loaded. Hiding an icon has no bearing on the item’s startup behavior (other than whether the icon shows up in the System Tray).
There’s even a registry edit that will hide all icons permanently if you’d like to handle all of the System Tray icons with a bigger stick.
Hiding All System Tray Icons
A relatively simple little registry edit can hide all System Tray icons, leaving the area displaying only the system time and date (and of course, you can disable these as well, as we’ve just seen).
Here’s what to do:
Open the Registry Editor by typing regedit at the Vista Start menu.
Navigate to this key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\ Explorer
and add a new DWORD value calledNoTrayItemsDisplay.
Double-click the new DWORD value and assign it a value of 1 (true).
Exit the Registry Editor and reboot your computer. Now, the System Tray should look like what you see in Figure 4-18.
To reenable the display of System Tray icons, you can either delete theNoTrayItemsDisplayDWORD value or set its value to 0.
The tab on the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box is called the Notification Area, and it’s called this for a reason. As users discover almost from the moment they first use their Vista computer, another function of the System Tray is to host application and operating system notifications that appear in the form of pop-up balloons. (OK, pop-up has a bad connotation; let’s say they fade in and out instead, shall we?)
Figure 4-18.No more Notification Area icons
It seems you can’t do anything about these balloon tips. Or can you? Can you turn off Vista’s capability to interrupt you with a notification?
As it just so happens, you can disable the balloons. To do so, you need either a registry hack or a piece of freely available software. I’ll discuss each.
Using the registry
As you know by now, registry settings define how the Vista operating system behaves, and that includes whether balloon tips display. To disable the notifications from appearing in the Notification Area, just follow this recipe:
Open the Registry Editor by clicking the Start menu and typing regedit.
Create a new DWORD key calledEnableBalloonTips, and set the value to 0 (false), as shown in Figure 4-19.
Now, exit the Registry Editor and reboot. You should no longer receive Vista’s notifications in the System Tray.
Figure 4-19. Turn off balloon tips with this registry edit
Using separate software
You can also change Notification Area behavior with applications such as TweakUI.
At least I think you can. I’m taking a bit of a flyer here; Vista authors had to start writing Vista books long before the operating system was made public, and long before related utilities such as TweakUI were updated to include support for Vista.
At any rate, TweakUI is part of a suite of utilities called PowerToys. (As of this writing, the full name is PowerToys for Windows XP.) PowerToys are available for free download from this web site:
Before you get carried away, note that TweakUI, as with the rest of the PowerToys, is not considered part of the operating system, and therefore is not supported by Microsoft. In fact, here’s the caveat emptor from Microsoft’s web site:
We take great care to ensure that PowerToys work as they should, but they are not part of Windows and are not supported by Microsoft. For this reason, Microsoft Technical Support is unable to answer questions about PowerToys. PowerToys are for Windows XP only.
Despite the warning, you can use the PowerToys utilities for a wide variety of tasks; disabling the Notification Area’s balloons is just one of them. And even though I’ve pointed you to a Windows XP resource, I’m told that they should be updated to include support for Windows Vista as well—as in by the time this title is nestled into your bookshelf, I’m betting.
The most sweeping changes to the desktop environment can be applied through the use of themes, which serve, essentially, as combinations of backgrounds, colors, sounds, and so forth. A few are included with the Vista installation, and you can download more still. To change a theme, follow these steps:
Open the Personalization application from Vista’s Control Panel. You can shortcut this by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing Personalize.
Follow the Theme link toward the bottom of this Personalization console, opening the Theme Settings dialog box as shown in Figure 4-20.
Figure 4-20. Changing the Vista theme
The cool thing here is the Save As feature. Any changes you’ve made to any part of the desktop environment can now be saved as part of a new, customized theme. In fact, notice that if you do something such as change the desktop background (to the green bamboo wallpaper shown in the figure—very attractive), you will then see the theme listed as Modified Theme. Just click Save As from here for the ability to change back to this background (and any associated sounds, icons, etc.) at any time without going through the extra click-steps.
Although I don’t want to belabor the point, I do want to be clear about what components are part of a theme. Here are the primary settings that, once changed, can be saved as part of a new theme. Also included are instructions about how to change each element. It’s fairly straightforward stuff; if you’ve changed a desktop background in Windows XP, 2000, or 98, you should be able to figure out what to do. But just in case:
Screensavers
From the Personalization Control Panel application, choose the Screen Saver link. Then, in the Screen Saver Settings dialog box, choose the desired screensaver from the drop-down menu. You then have a few other ways to govern behavior, such as the amount of time before the screensaver takes over.
Some screensavers, such as the 3D text screensaver, have additional settings you can configure.
Sounds
Follow the Sounds link from the Personalization Control Panel application to open the Sound dialog box, shown in Figure 4-21. Here, from the Sounds tab, you can select almost any Windows action and then preview or change the default sound associated with the action. You can then save a list of customized sounds as a Sound Scheme with the Save As button to allow for quick toggling among different sets of Windows sounds without having to manually reconfigure.
Mouse pointers
To change the look and behavior of the mouse pointer, follow the Mouse Pointers link in the Personalization Control Panel application. From here, you will see the Mouse dialog box with several tabs to fine-tune mouse settings, some of which will be hardware-dependent. For example, if you’re using a laptop, you’ll probably see two Buttons tabs: one for the touchpad built into the laptop, and one for the mouse you may connect when you’re not on the go. Other mouse pointer options include mouse speed and visibility options.
Desktop background
For changes to the desktop background, follow the—you guessed it—Desktop Background link in the Personalization Control Panel application. Now you’ll see a selection drop-down list that lets you specify a picture location (the default is the Windows Wallpapers location; %systemroot% \Web\Wallpapers) and then choose the desired picture. And of course, you can select any picture on your hard drive as the desktop background by browsing to it.
Color schemes
From the Personalization Control Panel application, choose Window Color and Appearance to change options that affect window colors. Note also that this dialog box will change depending on whether Areo is the selected color scheme. If so, you see options that can change the color and transparency of the glass. If not, you see an Appearance dialog box similar to what has been available in previous versions of Windows.
Figure 4-21. Changing a Windows sound
And remember, once you’ve spent a few hours making changes to elements that comprise a Vista theme, make sure to save your changes by accessing the Themes link and saving—a big timesaver when you want to apply the same settings some time in the future.
Here’s something that makes the preceding a little more worthwhile, an interesting nugget that can help you take even more control over the desktop environment—particularly when it comes to setting desktop backgrounds.
The list of Windows wallpapers you see when clicking the desktop background link in the Personalization Control Panel application is divided into sections such as black and white, light auras, paintings, textures, and so on. Where do these divisions come from, and can we add our own little Windows wallpaper grouping?
They come from the metadata tags associated with the pictures. To see what I mean, open a Vista Explorer window, look in the %WinDir%\Web\Wallpaper folder, and then look at the pictures there.
Select the painting of the carp image, for example, and then note the image properties in the Details pane (if the Details pane isn’t showing, click Organize -> Layout in Vista Explorer and make sure the Details pane is turned on). There, you should see that the tag associated with the painting of the carp is called Paintings. Vista uses this tag information when grouping the Vista wallpapers in the Desktop Background dialog box.
So, how can you put this to use? If you add a picture to this directory, you can edit the metadata tag associated with this picture to either add your own custom Windows wallpaper groups, or just add pictures to existing groups.
Note, however, that you need to grant yourself special permission to perform this action. Because this folder lives in the Windows directory, not even administrators have permission to edit metadata tags by default.
And no law says you have to add a metadata tag. If you just want the convenience of having all possible Windows wallpapers in one place, simply copy or move the pictures to the \Web folder. If no tag is specified, there will merely be an “Unspecified” wallpaper grouping in the Desktop Background dialog box, as seen in Figure 4-22.
Now that you understand how to manipulate elements of the Vista desktop to your liking and then save these changes as part of a desktop theme, surely there must be a way to undo things. There is, as we explore in the next couple of brief sections.
Restoring the Default Theme
You can easily reset the theme to what it was during the “out-of-box” experience. To restore Vista to the default theme, just follow these three steps:
Access the Control Panel’s Personalization application by right-clicking the desktop and choosing Personalize.
Click the Theme link to open the Theme Settings dialog box.
From the drop-down menu, choose the Windows Vista theme and click OK to complete the change.
If you don’t want to keep a saved theme around any longer, there’s a way to get rid of it.
Figure 4-22. Creating your own wallpaper categories
Please check back next week for the continuation of this article.
BrainDump 
Themes and Schemes in Vista
