More Desktop Schemes - 3D Color Changer April 04, 2001 My last article (Windows Schemes - etc. April 04, 2001) dealt with using a collection of preset color schemes to customize your Windows desktop. This article is about a really neat freeware program called 3D Color Changer 3000 that can work with the Schemes package from that first article; along with forty of it's own schemes, to give you virtually unlimited possibilities for customizing colors on your desktop. The payoff is much less hard drive storage space used and much less ongoing resource consumption than the alternative of using Themes. In addition this freebie program allows you to adjust several settings that are not available in the Properties Display Appearance tab of Windows. Here are some of the programs main features as described by the author: "Advanced color selections With 3D Color Changer 3000, you'll get access to every window element, which is impossible in Desktop Properties. You can customize the look of 3D frames, mouse highlight and much more. Color Capture is one of the most exciting 3D Color Changer 3000 features. With this feature you can capture color of every pixel. Useful when selecting a desktop background color suitable for your favorite wallpaper. Scheme Load/Save support makes it easy to store, manage and exchange your schemes over the Internet. Scheme files are extremely small (up to 300 bytes). There is also an Import from Desktop Theme feature which allows you to snag colors directly from desktop themes. Sample schemes will help you unveil the potential of 3D Color Changer 3000. There are over 30 samples including various modifications of default Windows color scheme to show how desktop can be tweaked!" You can make the two programs work together by remembering that when 3D Color Changer first starts up it scans in the current windows appearance settings. In practise, this means that you can select and apply one of the Schemes from the Display Properties Appearance tab; then start up 3D Color Changer and refine the settings to your liking and save the result as a 3D Color Changer Scheme. A final suggestion is to go through each of the Schemes that are in your Display Properties Appearance tab and remove the ones that you really don't like - this will result in less stuff being stored in you registry. Or you can use your Registry Editor and remove the schemes you don't like from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Appearance 3D Color Changer 3000 plus the freebie set of Schemes should give you hours of fun playing with your Windows appearance settings.