Give your Laptop some cool makeover & customization!

        Everyone owns a laptop (ok! a PC atleast) these days. Maybe yours is the all new Dell XPS series ferrari red laptop or an alienware black, but hey so is mine, and the kid next door has one too!! There goes the joy of having something to boast about. So what if the make is all same, its not like the only one ever made in the history of man kind, but hey, what if i tell you this, you & your buddy may have the very same brand, make or config, but there are many ways by which you can make your laptop stand out from the crowd. Maybe even make it scream out your personality! By the way, some of these ideas can be pulled on your Ipods, mobile phones or just about any electronics.  Interested? Enter the Make-trix!

1.Lets work on the exteriors
Forget those limited edition specially hand painted designs from the likes of dell, Hp which cost you a bomb. Say hello to the laptop skin. This is a decal or a self adhesive vinyl with some really cool designs ready-made, costs around 4$-10$ (500rs) in my neighborhood. It goes onto the frontal faceplate of your laptop. Don't worry, they can be peeled off easily! Some manufacturers might even let you customize your design, just give them your design or maybe your favorite wallpaper and they'll be happy to print it out for you. Here's some for inspiration

All images are copyrights of respective owners

2.LEDs on side panels
      There are some custom made solar powered stick-on LEDs available here for about 10 to 20$ but getting your hands on these might be difficult. As an alternative, use USB powered tube LED lights which looks like this.

If your laptop has air vents at the sides, make sure not to block them off completely when installing these LED tubes.


3.The GUI or the graphical User Interface
        Ever used an alienware laptop, you would know where i am getting at. Their UI is totally revved up with all shiny transitions and animations, custom sounds and more. But alienwares are not the only one with such UI, with a little bit of third party softwares, you can fine tune your UI or maybe even have the same look of an alienware with the alien skin and the alien UI.
Yes, alienware is so generous that it actually gives you a free lite version of their Alien GUI. The software is called alienGUI and its available for free at their website here. Thankyou Aliens!!

Apart from this, you must have heard about the shell managers or software such as "window blinds" from stardock, which has loads of shells/themes to choose from! These are much different from the normal windows theme manager. Sci fi, gaming, movies, grunge, you name it, they've got it! It customizes everything from the visual screens to the system sounds you hear during boot up or whatsoever. but the flipside is, they are not free. But yeah, you could try out a trial version here.

4.System sounds [optional]
      Ok maybe you wanna go that one step further where the eagles dare, customize the system sounds all by yourself. You can do that by going into the sound manager option in windows system, where they sounds are neatly categorized. All you have to do is make your self a recording or maybe a rip in WAV format, replace the system sounds with yours and you are done!

The next time you bring out your laptop from the bag, its gonna look all bad-ass with shiny lights and when  booting up you hear your baby speak "Welcome to Skynet,-your name here-" Now go ahead and flaunt your laptop!!