Tweak Aero's glass borders: Vista Hack

The borders around system windows, such as dialog boxes and the Control Panel, are transparent in Windows Vista's Aero interface. These borders are hackable; you can shrink them, make them larger, and change their colors and transparency levels.

To make the borders larger or smaller:

1. Right-click the desktop and select Personalize.

2. Click Window Color and Appearance.

3. Click Open classic appearance properties for more color options.

4. From the dialog box that appears, make sure that Windows Aero is selected as the color scheme. Click the Advanced button on the right side of the dialog box. The Advanced Appearance dialog box appears.

5. Select Border Padding in the Item drop-down menu. To change the size of the border, type a new size for the border. (The default is 4.) Click OK, then OK again. The sizes of the borders will now change.


There's more you can do to the borders as well. To change the border color, transparency and more, right-click the desktop and select Personalize > Window Color and Appearance.

1. Choose a color for your windows on the top of the screen, or custom-build a color by clicking Show color mixer and then moving the sliders that appear to mix your own color.

2. To change the transparency of window borders, move the Color intensity slider to the left to make them more translucent, and to the right to make them more opaque.

3. To turn off transparency, uncheck the box next to Enable transparency.