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Tips and Tricks

More skins! I want more!

There are more new ones all the time, with plenty to go around. And you can always design your own (see the Creating a Skin tab). The best sources for skins are http://www.windowblinds.net and http://www.skinz.org

WB.INI settings

These additional options are unsupported at the moment and are provided for experienced users who are interested in tweaking as much as possible. You can create a WB.INI file in your Windows directory to adjust some additional settings with the following possible options (the [GLOBAL] section must be the first entry):

[GLOBAL]
SizeLimit = 1   Make maximized windows show borders
WindowLock = 1   Make windows stick to screen borders
NOSOUND = 1   Disable all sounds included with skins
GoodStretch = 1   Enable high-quality graphics stretching for toolbars, buttons, and window borders. This slows these down, so only enable this option if you are seeing artifacts on these controls (like red lines under NT).
DisableCtrlKey = 1   Disable Ctrl-key exclusions

Ctrl-key exclusion

Hold down the Ctrl key before double-clicking to start an application to force WindowBlinds to ignore that app and not attempt to skin it. This does not add the application to the exclusion list for future instances. See the WB.INI section above for how to disable this feature. 

Suppress the configuration dialog on startup

Rather than loading WindowBlinds from the registry (see the Startup Settings tab), create a shortcut icon in your Startup folder with a target of:

"C:\Program Files\Object Desktop\WindowBlinds\wbload.exe" quiet

It is necessary to place the quiet parameter outside of the quotes around the wbload.exe location. 

Changing the tint on transparent Explorer folders

This change requires editing the registry. Do not do this if you are not comfortable editing the registry. Add a new string value named "transBCOL" without the quotes under the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Stardock\WindowBlinds\wb5.ini\WBLiteFX .
The colors are:

0=Default Blue
1=Yellow
2=Pink
3=Red
4=Green
5=Blue
6=Green (again)
7=Clear

You can attempt to experiment with other values up through 15, but the above work nicely in most instances. 

Improving the performance of Explorer folders

On the Background Bitmaps tab, ensure that Use inactive images is disabled. This forces WindowBlinds to use only one image for the backgrounds of Explorer folders.

Hardware acceleration (W2K + G400 or Permedia2 only)

On Windows 2000 only, the 5.10 or later G400 beta drivers from Matrox and the Permedia2 drivers support the optional driver calls of drvAlphaBlend and drvTransparentBlt. This dramatically accelerates alpha-blending and transparent blitting. These driver calls are optional parts of DDK for Windows, so we aren't aware of any drivers other than Matrox/Permedia2 which have implemented them yet.

To enable HW acceleration on Windows 2000, add the following to the [GLOBAL] section of WB.INI (located in \windows or \winnt, create the file if necessary).

UseHWAcc=1