The Vista Aero Theme is very beautiful. It is also the base Theme for many of the themes offered on this website. However, the Aero theme is a resource hog and will eat up lots of RAM. One of the reasons for this is that it makes a lot use of transparency.You will experience a boost in performance if you disable transparency.

Simply follow these instructions to do so:

Change can be nice, change can be useful, but many times, we just want to let this be like they were. For many, the computer desktop is something they don’t wanna change. This is where Vista is coming in. It changes everything…

From the slick mouse cursor to the totally overhauled Start menu and the transparent windows, everything has been altered.

But there is a solution: you can change all things back to the good old days of XP and even conserve some memory on the way! Here is how.

The this video from CNET shows you in a step by step tutorial how to set the theme of Vista back to the original XP and even Win98 look. As the author states: you can now really roll back the time machine!

Windows Vista will be continuously monitoring files on your computer to optimize the searching through these files. While this can be very handy, it has the potential to severily slow down your system.

Therefore, it’s a good practice to turn off this feature when you feel your system is running slow. To do so:

• Select Start and type “index options”, without quotations
• After the Indexing Options are loaded, click the Modify button.
• Then click Show all Locations
• A list of locations will be displayed in the form of a tree. Uncheck those folders which you do not want to be indexed. You can also use the Advanced button to specify file types to be indexed, but this part is optional.
• Click OK button to finalize.

This will effectively turn off the Indexing feature in Vista.

To be able to load 3rd party themes in XP, you’ll need t patch, make sure that you’ve patched your uxtheme.dll. This file, you can find in C:\WINDOWS\system32:

Copy the file to another location to backup it. Now download a patcher like UXPatcher and run it. Don’t be alarmed if the theme switches back the Win98 theme. The original theme will revert after a restart. Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to download and install the new XP Theme!

If you browse the internet, you’ll find a lot of cool looking Vista themes. For example, The Vista 13 Theme is a nice start.

Unzip the files in this package to the themes folder: C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes. Now, double-click the .msstyle file included in the zip file.

You will see that the theme changes to the new Vista theme!