MS Vista Theme Customization

Microsoft put a lot of effort into making Windows Vista a visually compelling operating system. The system still has the same Windows Vista theme protections in place that make it impossible to add custom themes to Windows Vista. There is also no easy way to change elements like the boot logo or system icons in Windows Vista.

The Windows Vista theme customization application Vista Visual Master changes that. It is a all in one solution for everyone who wants to customize the Windows Vista theme and appearance. The application can be divided into two sections. The first deals directly with the Windows Vista theme while the second takes care of system settings that relate to the visual appearance of Windows Vista.

One of the most important aspects of Windows Vista theme customization is patching the uxtheme.dll file in Windows Vista to be able to apply custom themes to the operating system. This option is available in Vista Visual Master. The same menu contains an option to change the Windows Vista theme directly to another one.

Other options that relate to the visual appearance of Windows Vista are the abilities to change Windows vista icons, logon pictures and the vista boot screen. All options are easily accessible and there is always an option to restore to defaults with should ease the minds of users who feel uncomfortable about changing system files in Windows Vista.

The second section is just the usual Windows Vista tweaker with the only difference that the available settings relate to visual effects on the system. It is for instance possible to remove icons from the computer deskop, remove shortcut arrows and to disable the changing of wallpapers in Windows Vista.

The main use of the tool is to customize the Windows Vista theme. It works flawlessly and creates backups of the most important files which come in handy if something goes wrong along the way.

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Earth-Venus smash-up possible in 3.5 billion years

This undated handout illustration provided by Nature Publishing group shows what a collision between Earth and Venus might look like. A force known as orbital chaos may cause our Solar System to go haywire, leading to possible collision between Earth and Venus or Mars, according to a study

The good news is that the likelihood of such a smash-up is small, around one-in-2500.

And even if the planets did careen into one another, it would not happen before another 3.5 billion years.

Indeed, there is a 99 percent chance that the Sun's posse of planets will continue to circle in an orderly pattern throughout the expected life span of our life-giving star, another five billion years, the study found.

After that, the Sun will likely expand into a red giant, engulfing Earth and its other inner planets -- Mercury, Venus and Mars -- in the process.

Astronomers have long been able to calculate the movement of planets with great accuracy hundreds, even thousands of years in advance. This is how eclipses have been predicted.

But peering further into the future of celestial mechanics with exactitude is still beyond our reach, said Jacques Laskar, a researcher at the Observatoire de Paris and lead author of the study.

"The most precise long-term solutions for the orbital motion of the Solar System are not valid over more than a few tens of millions of years," he said in an interview.

Using powerful computers, Laskar and colleague Mickael Gastineau generated numerical simulations of orbital instability over the next five billion years.

Unlike previous models, they took into account Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. Over a short time span, this made little difference, but over the long haul it resulted in dramatically different orbital paths.

The researchers looked at 2,501 possible scenarios, 25 of which ended with a severely disrupted Solar System.

"There is one scenario in which Mars passes very close to Earth," 794 kilometres (493 miles) to be exact, said Laskar.

"When you come that close, it is almost the same as a collision because the planets gets torn apart."

Life on Earth, if there still were any, would almost certainly cease to exist.

To get a more fine-grained view of how this might unfold, Laskar and Gastineau ran an additional two hundred computer models, slightly changing the path of Mars each time.

All but five of them ended in a two-way collision involving the Sun, Earth, Mercury, Venus or Mars. A quarter of them saw Earth smashed to pieces.

The key to all the scenarios of extreme orbital chaos was the rock closest to the Sun, found the study, published in the British journal Nature.

"Mercury is the trigger, and would be be the first planet to be destabilised because it has the smallest mass," explained Laskar.

At some point Mercury's orbit would get into resonance with that of Jupiter, throwing the smaller orb even more out of kilter, he said.

Once this happens, the so-called "angular momentum" from the much larger Jupiter would wreak havoc on the other inner planets' orbits too.

"The simulations indicate that Mercury, in spite of its diminutive size, poses the greatest risk to our present order," noted University of California scientists Gregory Laughlin in a commentary, also published in Nature.