why is vista so dark?

I decided to install vista on my laptop yesterday since dell has released all the necessary drivers, and I was disappointed. It's too dang dark. I hated that you couldn't change the taskbar color from anything other than different tints of black, but what I hated the most was that the title bar of a full screen window turned black, with no apparent way to change that. I had backed up the HD with acronis prior to installing, so I just went back to XP. I thought it would look great on this glossy screen but it just looked like crap.

is there any way to customize the aero colors? if not for the taskbar, at least the full screen thing? I couldn't find any color settings outside of being able to tint aero different colors, which didn't affect the full screen title bar. Also, is there any way to change the hi-lite color in the start menu? I could barely see it.

because it wants your soul

Maybe I'm not understanding what your asking for when you say the color of "the full screen thing." If you mean a explorer window then its very easy to change the colors. Right click on desktop and choose "Personalize" Then go to "window color and Appearance", Then choose the overall color you want and decide where you want the "color intensity" to be then click "show color mixer" and mess with "Hue", "Saturation" and "Brightness" to acheive the overall color you want. Besure to uncheck the "Enable Transparency" to make the color of the taskbar stand out a little more. Hope this helps as the colors arent great but atleast there is more options than XP has.

The full screen thing i'm referring to is where, say you open IE, it has the icon, the title and the min/max/close buttons. In XP it's blue.

In full screen mode its just a darker version of what ever color you picked

So if you chose graphite. Its blackk

I just tried setting to pink and on full screen the title bar is like a purply color.

If you slide the color intensity to the right it turns back to pink

Also you can go into advanced controls and make it any color you want

Do not give up so easily my friend

They have simplified all of the the controls so for us power users it makes things more difficult


With Red and intensity to the right

Screen Capture curteousy of built in Snipping tool

Thanks for the tip. I'll get around to installing it again.

I really shouldn't have bothered at the time as I had a bit of work to do on the lappy, so instead of fiddling I just quickly went back to XP, so I wouldn't have to reinstall everything.

Neur0mancer said:

In full screen mode its just a darker version of what ever color you picked

So if you chose graphite. Its blackk

I just tried setting to pink and on full screen the title bar is like a purply color.

If you slide the color intensity to the right it turns back to pink

Also you can go into advanced controls and make it any color you want

Do not give up so easily my friend

They have simplified all of the the controls so for us power users it makes things more difficult

With Red and intensity to the right

Screen Capture curteousy of built in Snipping tool

Click to expand...

Yes, you get some customization, but I agree with schnikies79 in that even after you set everything as bright as you can, it STILL looks overly dark to me as well. Notice how dark the red is even after turning everything as bright as it will go.

i use graphite. its sexy