We have had some really awesome CursorFX themes added to the WinCustomize galleries over the past week, and I wanted to highlight a few. One is even the first CFX theme they have created, and it turned out great. We love to see new people submitting so be sure to check them out below!

MODEL-6IX by BONEHEADdb

fly by NIGHT by pelaird

Light Load by Gemmee

Nearly fourteen years ago, long before I arrived here at Stardock, some of my colleagues arrived to the office on a chilly morning. Tied to a post in the parking lot was a small poof-ball of a puppy, a little Shih Tzu mix, who would eventually come to be called Sophie.

Sophie, in all her little floofy glory, not long after she was adopted by Pat

Pretty much everyone here at Stardock is a major animal lover, so there wasn't any chance of Sophie being left out in the cold. Our manager of Tachyon and long time employee, Pat, scooped her up and took her home, where she lived happily with him and his family for 14 years until she passed away last month.

She came in and out of the office with him often during those 14 years, and that was how I met her: as a wiggling, happy little energetic dog who was all too enthused about running over to my desk to get treats from me. I am definitely the sucker here at the office - all of the dogs know where my desk is and who has the snacks, both human and canine!

A picture of Sophie from about a year ago. 
She was deeply loved and is terribly missed.

And thus, the tradition of "Stardogs" was accidentally born. Sophie started coming into work with Pat from time to time, and as the years went on and other employees adopted dogs of their own, they would also come into the office and share the joy of man's best friend with everyone.

Since it's 2020 and everything has been a dumpster fire lately, I figured we were all due for a dose of cute - and dogs fit the bill! This is by no means a comprehensive list of everyone's dogs here at the company, just the dogs whom I've met and have visited over the years. And here they are, in no particular order:

CEO Brad Wardell's dog, Bailey, hanging out in the Stardock Cafeteria

Bailey is a 9 year old Entlebucher Mountain Dog who was brought home as a puppy by the Wardell family. She loves food and has no problem foraging for it (sometimes we think she's a Trash Panda masquerading as a dog!) and really loves her family. Bailey comes into work every day with Brad or his wife, Debbie, who works on our operations team. 

Remember how I said that Bailey really loves her family? Well if she can't be with all of them at once, she certainly has her first choice, who happens to be Debbie. Debbie works on the top floor of the office while Brad works downstairs with the games team, which often puts poor Bailey into conflict. Fun fact? Bailey can open (disclaimer: some) doors.

It's not an unusual sound here at Stardock to hear a dog howling in the stairwell. If we do, we know it's Bailey - she's opened the downstairs door and has gone all the way to the top floor, but she can't open that door because it pulls rather than pushes. Eventually, one of us will usually go free her so that she can get back to one of her humans. She really is a funny dog!

Trixie loves people so much that she will come barreling toward you if she hasn't seen you in awhile and
all but knock you over in order to give you kisses and get your pets. 

Trixie was adopted at around a year or so of age from long-time employee Paul, who has been bringing her into work with him every day since. Never liking to be far from Paul, Trixie follows him everywhere he goes, wandering off only every so often to seek out some treats (from me, the sucker) or some pets (from just about anyone, we all love petting dogs here). 

Trixie is known for crying when she can't find Paul, and it's enough to break your heart. Her exuberance whenever they are reunited is definitely enough to mend that, though! Truly, this dog just has so much love to give that she hardly knows what to do with it all.

Cheesecake posing as a Beanie Baby for Halloween 2020

Cheesecake is an English Cream Golden Retriever and is just a little over a year old. She was picked out as a puppy by Ryan Wardell, who is one of our artists here. She started coming into the office with him at the end of last summer, and it's been a joy for all of us to watch her grow up! 

Cheesecake is at her happiest when she is getting treats and pets - especially on the belly, which she is all too happy to present to you as soon as she sees you. She spends most of the work day hanging out in her nice soft bed near Ryan's desk, and I am always delighted to run into her when she's wandering around.

Remi, the newest and youngest Stardog to join the fleet! She is HR Operation Manager Amy's first dog.

Remi is a miniature Australian Shepherd and was adopted by Amy a little over 2 months ago. This little spitfire has only visited the office a couple of times, but it was more than enough to leave some serious pawprints on our hearts.

Remi's favorite activities include snuggling, dragging giant stuffed toys around the house, and running around with all of her puppy energy and greeting any humans she comes into contact with. She is a much needed dose of joy whenever she visits and we can't wait till she pops in again!

Paladin, pictured with his favorite stuffed animal: a squirrel, which Sarah says he is rarely without.

Paladin is a 4 year old mixed breed (some terrier, some pit-bull, and who knows what else!) that QA Support Systems Engineer Sarah adopted through a shelter exchange program. According to Sarah, Paladin loves to tug on ropes, play keep-away with tennis balls, and chew on bones!

He visits the office occasionally, and while he's a little timid at times, he warms up pretty quickly (especially if you have a snack to share). I mean, look at that face - how can you not just love it?

Scherzer's human assures me he's a hardcore Michigan State fan and was just borrowing his other dog friend's UofM bed.
Trust me, this rivalry is serious business here in Michigan!

Scherzer is another new addition to the Stardog roster along with his human, Max, who just joined the games team a few months ago! A shepherd mix of some kind, Scherzer is almost two years old and has been with his family since November of last year. According to Max, he loves balls (tennis balls are his favorite!) and will systematically hunt down and destroy the squeaker in any toys that dare to make noise, leaving a flurry of cloth and cotton in his wake.

I just met Scherzer for the first time last week and I fell in love (which, for me, really isn't hard. If it has four legs, a tail, and is soft, then I am immediately friends with it). He's so soft, like petting a cloud! 

Indy at about 4 months old. I swear he was winking at me!

Indy belongs to long-time Stardock friend Kris, who picked him out when he was just a little puppy. This little golden cotton ball is super well-behaved and is very attached to Kris, whom he follows everywhere! He is always happy to come over for a little love and attention, and he will happily chase and (sometimes) bring back a ball for you.

He's much bigger now from when pictured above, but since Kris lives out of state and is employed elsewhere at the moment, we haven't seen Indy in person for quite awhile. We can't wait until they visit again, though!

Whew! So that's our current roster of Stardogs - and like I said earlier, it's by no means a complete list! A lot of us here at Stardock also have cats and other furry (or scaly, or slimy!) friends, so it's really just a big collection of all-around animal lovers here.

Share your precious pets - canine and otherwise! - in the comments with me, and don't you dare skimp on the pictures. Bring on the cute!

Can you believe we are already in November? Has the cooler weather hit your area yet? We had lots going on in October here on WinCustomize as Halloween is always a popular month. 

Here's a wrap-up of some new, articles, forum posts, and skins you might have missed!

Stardock News:

Groupy v1.44 is Now Available

Featured changes:

• Groupy crashes if turned off quickly after being turned on
• Windows with a blank caption now paints the close tab button correctly
• If windows are not responding it should no longer leave the group when moved
  • It cannot be resized though or added to a group
• Tweaks that address an issue with leftover tab bars on-screen in edge cases

Community Posts You Might Have Missed:

Happy Halloween! Is your Desktop Spooky Yet?

Scientists Located and Destroyed an Asian Giant Hornet Nest Over the Weekend

Congrats to our Newest WinCustomize Journeyman....BONEHEADdb!

WC Community Question: Do You Customize Your Icons?

Check Out These Halloween Mouse Cursors for Windows 10!

Customize your Windows Icons with IconPackager

Another video game movie is on its way and it seems less than faithful to the source material

New and Updated Skins, Themes, and Wallpapers:

Model 5ive (CursorFX)

The_Witcher (DeskScapes)

Circle Beauty (Wallpaper)

Country Road Oct (Wallpaper)

Christmas Ornament Countdown (Desktop Gadget)

DC-27G (Desktop Gadgets)

Emperon 5 (WindowBlinds)

Tropicali (WindowBlinds)

In 2015 I wrote a blog post here showing my PC build that I was working on. I've had that PC ever since and it's been one of the best PC build I've ever done. It would run many of the latest games at ultra settings, and has been a great PC to edit videos and just do general work with. 

I've added a couple small upgrades such as doubling the RAM to 16GB, adding another SSD drive for games, and replacing smaller hard drives for bigger storage. 

Lately though, games are running a bit slower but the GTX 970 has been a fabulous video card overall. I definitely got my money's worth from I guess what would have been considered more of a mid-range card back then. I figured it was time to start thinking about an upgrade.

With my birthday around this time, I was gifted a EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Super Sc Ultra Gaming card. This is another mid-range card, but its performance has exceeded my expectations. Everything is fast and I can again run games at ultra settings!

Sure, it might not be latest and most expensive card available, but it works great for me and it was a great price. 

Happy spooky season, everyone! Here at Stardock, we love two things: Halloween, and desktop customization.

Stardock Halloween 2019!

Actually, we love quite a lot more than just those two things, but stick with me here! Halloween is on Saturday, and unfortunately this year won't be filled with the usual trick-or-treating hullabaloo (normally I get 400+ kids in my neighborhood!). That doesn't stop me from decorating for the holiday anyway! I'll be turning my porch light off this year, saving around $80 on candy, and visiting with my sister, her husband, and my almost-one-year-old niece.

I don't actually own much in the way of Halloween decor (that's really my sister's thing), but I have a few pumpkins around the house and some spooky lighting. And, as soon as the Calendar flipped to October 1, I went over to WinCustomize.com and started looking through all of the customizations there so I could add some spooky flare to my desktop.

Several of our desktop applications offer unique customization for your Windows PC. The most popular apps for dressing up your desktop for the holidays is DeskScapes, which will let you apply static or animated backgrounds, called Dreams, and WindowBlinds, which lets you skin your desktop in lots of different ways.

Here are a few of my favorite Spooky Dreams and WindowBlinds skins to help you dress up your desktop this Halloween!

Spooky Halloween Forest With Bats by WC_Bot

Happy_Halloween_Night by cyberslober

Pumpkin by Night by IslandDog

Bat O Ween by DaveBax

NineHalloween Recut by doortech1

Is your desktop decked out for Halloween? Share your screenshots with me!

Image courtesy Washington Department of Agriculture via Twitter

2020 has been quite a year already, but a few months ago nature decided to throw another curveball and add invasive Asian giant hornets - AKA Murder Hornets - to the proverbial Bingo card.

Although we first heard about the hornets arriving in North America back in the winter of 2019, it has taken scientists some time to come up with strategies for how to locate and destroy the nests. Why all of the destruction, you ask? As it turns out, Asian giant hornets can be absolutely devastating for a honeybee colony, wiping out thousands of bees in the span of only a few hours.

Considering all of the threats that honeybee populations already face, it seems like a good idea to head this one off at the pass and deal with this invasive species swiftly and aggressively. That said, here's the good news: Entomologists in Washington destroyed the first nest of Asian giant hornets discovered in the U.S. just this past weekend.

Researchers located the nest by trapping a few live specimens and outfitting them with a radio tracker using, of all things, dental floss. Clad head to toe in protective gear (the Asian giant hornet's sting is said to feel like "red-hot thumbtacks" stabbing into you), the team worked to vacuum the hornets out of the tree and into canisters.

Image courtesy Washington Department of Agriculture via Twitter

The basket-ball sized nest was inside of a tree on private property, which the agriculture team has cut down in order to search for any newborn hornets and to see if any young queens might have already left the hive to start their own colonies.

Asian giant hornets are the largest known hornet on earth, with queens able to reach over 2-inches in size. Primarily, the insects survive on tree sap, but they also consume other colony-living insects like honey bees. The hornets actually decapitate their prey, and it only takes a small group of them to murder an entire hive of bees in a matter of hours. 

Scientists suspect that there may be more nests in the area and are working to locate and destroy them before the hornets reach their "slaughter phase" and go looking for any innocent beehives. 

Although most stinging insects set me into a panic (and these might straight up give me a heart attack), I love honey bees and am happy to see them protected. I find entomology fascinating, so following this entire saga has actually been a little bit fun, especially since it seems to be moving toward a happy ending for the bees. 

Have you been following the murder hornet saga? Share your thoughts with me.

Over the past month we've featured many Halloween themed skins of all types, and even focused a bit more on animated wallpapers for DeskScapes and cursor themes for CursorFX.

Halloween is less than a week away, so we'll finish off our Halloween postings this month with a look at our favorite WindowBlinds skins!

Bat O Ween

Bad Jack

Halloween BoO

Do you skin on Turkey day? Get it.... Turkeys....skins......oh never mind.

As we have discussed before, Halloween and Christmas are the two biggest skinning holidays of the year, but we do have one more between that, and that would be Thanksgiving. It hasn't been a big skinning holiday and there's only about two pages worth of uploads. 

My question is though, is it something you skin your desktop for? Just wondering if we should be looking out for more or just focusing on the next big holiday. 

We're getting closer to Halloween and we've been featuring many of the fantastic Halloween skins we have here on WinCustomize. I was browsing through the CursorFX gallery this morning and noticed another Halloween themed cursor, so I thought CursorFX would be fun to spotlight this week. 

Use CursorFX to easily change your Windows mouse cursor to one of thousands available on WinCustomize!

Toxic Halloween

Black Widow Halloween

Pumpkin

Creepers

Halloween

Before coming to Stardock, I never really had a deep appreciation for Windows customization. I remember downloading the occasional Windows background and all sorts of skins (and frankly, probably viruses - sorry mom and dad!) for WinAmp back in my teen years, but that was about the extent of it. 

Since being here though, I've garnered an entirely new appreciation for being able to make my desktop look fun and unique - both my PC desktop AND my workspace desktop, too.

My work desktop.
Fortunately, I work with a bunch of wonderful nerds, so no one thinks twice about the chaos.

Honestly, the thought of changing the icons on my desktop had never crossed my mind before I started exploring the apps in the Object Desktop suite and came across IconPackager. Initially, I didn't think much about it - I have no idea how to make custom icons, after all - but the good news is, you don't have to!

IconPackager lets you instantly replace Windows' default icons with high quality custom icons. There are several packages that come as a default (including my favorite, which is a Christmas theme), but thousands more are available on WinCustomize.com. One of the best things about IconPackager is that you can also edit the color scheme of a package so that everything has a nice cohesive look while sporting your favorite color.

Browse thousands of icon packages on Wincustomize.com.

One of the best things about IconPackager is that you can also edit the color scheme of a package so that everything has a nice cohesive look while sporting your favorite color.

I know purple isn't especially representative of Christmas, but I'm trying to show a point here!

If you're like me and you appreciate a little bit of of an eclectic look, you don't have to change all your icons to a single theme - you are free to change them individually, too! 

An example of changing individual icons.

IconPackager is compatible with the most popular versions of Windows, including Windows 10. Have you tried it yet? Check it out here!