On top of the organizational and customizational benefits, the Vista Start Menu’s developers have taken into account the human brain’s cognitive abilities and limitations – particularly that your brain is darn good at using visual memory to find stuff.

h/t to Tekzilla for the tip.

First, I should preface this with the tidbit that I spent a couple hours looking around the net for some way to hack my lousy Home Basic to enable the Aero theme (glass/transparent windows, thumbnail preview and Flip 3D task switching). Despite the claims of about a zillion Web sites all touting the same registry hack – it appears this isn’t possible. What follows is part one of my free “Aero alternatives”.

Shock Aero 3D

Shock Aero 3D is pretty damn close to the actual Flip 3D effect, and at this price (it’s freeware), we’re certainly willing to overlook any small discrepancies. The program allows you to choose between a flat “tile” display, or the cooler “flip” effect that stacks your open program windows on a 3D z-axis.

The utility also gives you quite a bit of control over animation effects and background styles, both so you’re able to customize things and so you’re able to disable more graphic-intensive processes should your system not be able to handle them.

You can grab Shock Aero 3D here, and be sure to check out the developer’s other cool apps for customizing your desktop experience.

Shock Aero works on XP/2000/2003/Vista systems with OpenGL support.

Madotate

I’ve no idea who comes up with these names, but considering this comes out of Japan, I guess we can allow for a bit of a tongue-twisting moniker. Madotate is similar to Shock Aero in the style of its effect (throwing your open apps onto a 3D axis), however where Shock Aero separates the application selection from your desktop, Madotate integrates right into it.

By a small button which the program adds to the top-right of your windows (beside the minimize, maximize, close buttons), you are able to instantly slide the open app into 3D-mode and out of your way. The windows automatically dock to the screen edge they are closest to.

Madotate comes with a rather comprehensive set of options to customize things. You can turn transparency of the 3D-ified windows on or off, tag the windows, change the angle and distance of the effect, set hot keys to effect both the active program and all programs, and a few more.

As mentioned, Mandotate is a Japanese program, but some kind folks went to the trouble of translating it into English. Grab the English version here, or if you’d rather, get the original from the site of the author, Takayuki Shinohara.

Madotate works on pretty much every version of Windows since Windows 95.

Both of the programs have their pluses. Shock Aero has a slightly simpler functionality about it, while Madotate has more organizational/workflow possibilities. When it comes to resources though, Madotate wins hands down, barely pushing the 6MB mark on memory resources.

Know of any other apps that add some pizazz to the otherwise rather mundane task-switching functionality? Leave us a comment.

I like to keep my non-system/program files on a partition, while leaving the standard C drive to hold the bulk of installed programs and system files. This keeps all my media (movies, music, photos, etc.) seperate from the drive that houses my OS – allowing me a quick and easy way of formatting the system drive, and not needing to back up the much bulkier “media” drive.

Windows, by default, works counter to this by setting up the My Documents folder’s location to the C drive. In the past I went around this by denying that the My Documents folder even existed, and just making my own file system.

As many programs use this area as a default storage area for certain data, as well as some games using it for saved game files, this eventually led to a rather messy file structure that had half of my data on the media partition and half of it on the system partition. Sucky to say the least.

But as I said, a new system – new rules. I finally decided to dig a bit and see if I couldn’t change the default location of the My Documents (or “Documents” directory – as it’s called in Vista). The solution was a WHOLE lot simpler than I had assumed, and I felt rather stupid I hadn’t noticed it sooner.

To change the location, simply follow these steps:

1. Click the START button. With the mouse over the My Documents (“Documents” for Vista) folder/icon, right click and select Properties.
2. For XP: On the Target tab (Location for Vista), simply change the Target folder location to whichever location you prefer.
3. To select a location from the standard file/folder selection box, choose “Find Target…”, or if you prefer to move your current My Documents folder to the new location, choose “Move…” and select your new location.
4. To restore the original location, just click “Restore Default”.

That’s it. It’s just that simple. You can get a few more My Documents customizations at Microsoft’s support page.

Well, Spacemonger is neato little app (just a 100kb download) which looks at your hard drive and then renders a graphical representation of its contents. Files, folders, and apps which take up the most space are represented by bigger squares.

As a result you can easily determine where the trash is, and then proceed with throwing it out.

Download Spacemonger for Windows here.

Here’s a sample of what you’ll see once you run it:

The Zune theme, which was previously called “Royale Noir”, has been out for a while – but unless you’re on a serious hunt for XP customizations, or have a Zune player, you’re not likely to stumble across it. However, if you’ve upgraded your Windows Media Player to version 10 or 11, you might be familiar with the look.

It features a rather dark, very Web 2.0-ish feel, with bright orange highlights and START button. And, unlike skinning software (such as WindowBlinds), it’s extremely light on system resources.

Installing this mod couldn’t be easier. Simply click here to download the theme’s install file – once downloaded, double-click it to install. The theme should activate automatically, but if not, or should you like to tweak it a bit, all the settings are available in XP’s Display Properties – under the Themes and Appearance tabs.

Grab a couple cool new wallpapers, sit back and enjoy the new look of your desktop.