Make XP Look Like Longhorn/Vista
The Royal Inspirat Special Edition theme for Windows XP by Stefanka is by far the coolest theme I’ve ever used, and I’ve waded through hundreds of them. It’s nice to change your desktop theme once in awhile. It’s much like changing your sheets–or getting a new shower curtain.
This theme is based loosely on Microsoft Windows Vista™ (heretofore known as Longhorn), which, if the beta releases are to be believed, will feature the Aero theme. Aero uses the Segoe UI typeface—quite an improvement over the XP standard Tahoma font. The icons are very cool too.
The best way to use Microsoft’s Visual Styles–without the overhead and adware silliness of a binary like TGTSoft’s StyleXP–is to do a little dll shuffling. Here’s a short article on how this is done. If you do decide to switch out uxtheme.dll, be VERY careful to obtain the version of the DLL that corresponds to your service pack and build (a four-digit number, normally beginning with 2***).
Happy stylin’. ◊
Update
Thanks to Jason J. Thomas for dropping a link in the comments to a page that shows you exactly how to extract the proper DLL using a purpose-built utility. Again I can't stress enough that you need to know your shell build (i.e., which Service Pack you have).
10 Missives So Far
01 freak2532 said on Tue Jul 26 18:46:37 EDT
that is a nice looking theme(and i've seen thousands of them as well)... Personally i use bbLean (bblean.org) because its light and low resources and very very easy to hack the whole thing... but i'll have to check this one out...
02 josh said on Tue Jul 26 18:54:59 EDT
I used blackbox on my linux machines for about 3 years -- and then fluxbox for a bit. The funny thing is that, now that I've given up on the minimalist thing, Blackbox (and I think Flux too) are included in most major distros. This is all by way of bitching that I had to build BB from source every time I installed it, and now it's standard.
03 Jason J. Thomas said on Wed Jul 27 10:21:50 EDT
I have found an even incredibly easier tutorial for doing this, as the Neowin.net forums seem to have dated patches for the UXTheme.dll. Check it out here:
http://www.uneasysilence.com/how-to-use-unsigned-themes-on-windows/
Now to reboot and see how I like this theme.
06 josh said on Thu Jul 28 20:13:32 EDT
Finally I get why Mac versioning is based on felines -- Meow!
07 John (SYNTAGMA) said on Fri Jul 29 16:35:09 EDT
Wow, that is really cool, Josh. I gathered from Gone Away's blog that you were a bit of a whizz at this sort of thing. Man, you are the knee's bees!
08 supa said on Tue Aug 2 15:46:32 EDT
random and unrelated: I found that baby safe feeder you were talking about. it doesn't have a theme, but I like it anyway. thanks for the tip.
09 josh said on Wed Aug 3 3:49:44 EDT
No sweat, sorry I didn't get back to you about it, it was a busy July. :P
10 josh said on Wed Aug 3 3:52:10 EDT
Sheesh, John, I think my response to your comment got stuck in the space between. I seem to remember typing something like "Thanks: For visiting, and puffing me up." :)
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