Kylir's Website » Windows

Themes in Pidgin

Kylir — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:24:52 +0000

One of the newer updates to Pidgin made it a little harder to use GTK+ themes in the application (I like mine to look like the window below). You can follow the instructions from this link to get Pidgin looking decent:

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Pidgin#win32_gtk_theme

Once you’ve modified your Pidgin install, you will want to place your themes into \Gtk\share\themes. My favorite Pidgin/GTK theme is ClearLooks DarkLime. It’s awesome for both Pidgin and Ubuntu.

Chrome and KatMouse Compatibility Issues

Kylir — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:46:57 +0000

Lately I’ve been really bothered by a weird bug where Chrome looses focus after scrolling via the mouse scroll wheel. The problem is with KatMouse, a simple program that makes the scroll wheel applicable to windows that are not focused, similar to how it works in Linux. Fortunately, the fix for this strange behavior is really easy and simple.

Open the KatMouse settings and navigate to the Classes tab.
Click the target window icon and drag it over an open Chrome window. Make sure you release the mouse when the cursor is over the main Chrome window (not over the tabs, for example).
The Chrome window class should now appear in the KatMouse classes grid as shown below. Click Apply or OK and you should be golden.

I don’t know why this works, but I’m glad that it does. KatMouse is an awesome little tool that fixes a huge Windows annoyance.

How to remove the desktop watermark from Windows 7

Kylir — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:11:10 +0000

If you are running a beta or release candidate of Windows 7 or if you’ve turned test signing on (like me) and you would like to remove the annoying watermark from the corner of your desktop, downloaded and run the following small executable. I’ve used it without any problems on Windows 7 64-bit RC (Build 7100) and the retail version of Windows 7 64-bit (Build 7600). It works like a charm and my machines no longer have the ugly “Evaluation Copy” or “Testing Mode” text sitting in the bottom corner of my desktop.

http://www.askvg.com/how-to-remove-windows-7-rc-watermark-build-info-from-desktop/

Disabling the “Your computer is low on memory” and “Close programs to prevent information loss” dialogs

Kylir — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:28:23 +0000

Vista got a lot of things right. It also got a few things wrong. The naggy UAC “are you sure you want to do this” prompts is one example. Another annoyance is the sudden dialog that interrupts what you’re doing to tell you that less than 25% of your RAM is free. This warning would probably be warranted and helpful on systems with a small amount of RAM, but on mine 25% free memory is hardly anything to worry about – it means I have at least 1 GB of memory left.

Fortunately, like most things, there’s a fix.

Open the registry editor. (Click the Windows orb, type “regedit”, and hit enter.)
Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WDI\DiagnosticModules\.
Export the following folders. This is your backup in case something goes wrong.
{5EE64AFB-398D-4edb-AF71-3B830219ABF7}
{45DE1EA9-10BC-4f96-9B21-4B6B83DBF476}
{C0F51D84-11B9-4e74-B083-99F11BA2DB0A}
Take ownership of the each folder mentioned in step 3. (You can take ownership by right clicking the folder and then hitting permissions. Click the advanced button and change owner to your user. Click OK and then give full control to your user group. Hit OK again.)
Delete the folders from step 3.
Reboot and enjoy.

Update: After doing the above steps, you should know that once memory runs out, it is out. You will have no warning. Once your memory gets maxed out, programs will behave very erratic and suddenly crash without warning. I’ve decided that this side effect can be just as annoying as the popups. If you consistently push your machine’s memory to its limits, you should think twice about disabling the low memory messages. Having said that, I still prefer using my machine without Vista’s nagginess.

How to hide a user account from the welcome screen in Vista

Kylir — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:11:28 +0000

There is a special list in the registry which you can use to prevent user accounts from appearing on Vista’s welcome screen. To add a user account to this list, open the registry editor (regedit.exe) and navigate to:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList]

If SpecialAccounts or UserList does not exist, create it. Create a DWORD registry value for the name of the user that you want to hide and name it the same as the user. Make sure it is set to 0, which will flag the user as being hidden on the welcome screen. If you set it to 1, then it will be visible.

And that’s it!