There are many parts to a window, some more important than others. One of the less important areas would be the border padding, that space around the edges. With Vista’s new Aero interface, this border padding seems larger than it needs to be, most likely so the transparency of those borders is apparent. Ironically, if the border was smaller, it wouldn’t need to be transparent (wouldn’t be covering anything up). Kristan points out how to shrink the border padding for those Aero windows. Note that you can do the same for Vista’s basic theme as well, but the steps are slightly different, and will be covered in the next tip.

Here’s what my ‘Computer’ window looks like with the default border padding settings (click any image to see it full size):

1. Right-click on your desktop and choose Personalize from the menu.
   
2. In the Personalization window, select Window Color and Appearance.
   
3. In the Window Color and Appearance window, click on Open classic appearance properties for more color options.
   
4. In the Appearance Settings window, select Windows Aero as the color scheme, and click the Advanced button.
   
5. In the Advanced Appearance window, select Border Padding from the Item menu.
   
6. Set the Size window to a smaller number than the default, which is 4. I’m changing mine to 0.
   
7. Click OK to close the Advanced Appearance window, and OK to close the Appearance Settings window, which will apply the changes to your windows.

Here is how my ‘Computer’ window looks after reducing the border padding to 0: