So you have Vista...

And you quite like it, despite the fact that you've read all kinds of shit on the internet that it sucks the sweat off of a dead man's balls, but you wish it was a bit more, well, you.

So what do you do? Do you start trawling the net in a vain attempt to find an uberhacker who is willing to show you the zen art of white hatting so you can customize your computer to look like you want it. (After all, showing off your individuality is one of the joys of computers and t'internet.) Or do you use the following tools and tricks to improve your computing experience.

So you'd like your desktop to look all cool and skeezy but you're not the arty type and don't know one end of photoshop from the other. This is where Deviantart comes into play. Deviantart is so full of wallpapers you will be stuck for choice for what to put into your wallpaper file.

But what if you're the type that would like a really trick desktop? Well here's a handy little page that shows you how, with very little tech knowledge, you can have an even cooler desktop that shows a loop of any movie file. (If you are familiar with movie editing you can also create your own if you want.) Here's one I made from a small loop from the TV show Dr Who.

(If you want a copy of the file click here.)

Next up on the list of handy little tricks you can do with vista is thanks to the Winvistaclub website which has a very nice little program that allows more than 130 different tweaks you can easily apply with only a few mouse clicks. Included in the tweaks are several different personalization tweaks, security tweaks and several more.

The final site for customizing Vista is howtogeek which has a huge list of tweaks and tips for windows Vista, Firefox, Windows XP and also has tweaks for Ubuntu, Linux and Microsoft office.

(Remember to always backup your computer before attempting any tweaks, keep a copy of any files you remove just in case it all goes a bit Pete Tong and set system restore points before any major modding.)

Have fun.