Thread: How to Completely Customize your Windows Desktop

Topics:
- Windows Themes
- Mouse/Pointer
- Wallpaper
- Other

There are many different resources you can choose from to customize your desktop. In my experiences, I have found that the best resource is Deviant Art. This site has an enormous collection of wallpapers, themes, cursors, and much more.

1. Windows Themes
Here, you have two options: You can use windows blinds, or you can do all of the customization yourself. I prefer to customize things myself without the assistance of a third party program ,which is what I'll be talking about in this guide, but if you feel that this guide is too complicated or you don't want or have time to do it all your self, Windows Blinds is a pretty good alternative.

Before you are able to use custom themes on windows, you will need to download and run the Universal Theme Patcher.

Download Link: http://soft3.wmzhe.com/download/deep...r_20090409.zip

Now inside of the zip file, you will see two different programs. One is for 32 bit systems, and the other is for 64 bit systems. To figure out which version you have, right click on computer in the start menu, and then click properties. Under the system section, you'll see system type. This will indicate if your operating system is 32 bit or 64 bit.

Computer (Right Click) > Properties > Scroll down to system



Now that you know which type you have, run the appropriate version of the patcher.
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU RUN THE PROGRAM AS AN ADMINISTRATOR.
(To run it as an administrator, right click on the program and click run as administrator)

Now choose your language and click OK. You will then see a window that tells you how many of your files are patched, and how many need to be patched. If the 3 are already patched, then obviously you don't need to do this again. Once the program is up, you will see the three files that need to be patched and Patch and Restore options for each. Click Patch for each file, and it will ask you to reboot. After you restart your system your ready to start themeing your desktop. (If anything is wrong after you restart. open the program again and click restore on all of the files, and restart again. This has never been an issue for me, but anything is possible.)

If you choose to use Windows Blinds, you do not need to patch these files

Now from here, you have a lot of choices to make. There are so many different themes out there to choose from. However, for this guide, we'll stick to using only Deviant Art. IMO the best theme is the one that i'm using is called "Glass Onion for W7" and can be found here: Glass Onion for W7. However, any theme or more correctly, visual style, will work.

When you download a theme it will include a folder containing on the theme resources, and the actual visual style. To install the theme, you need to copy the visual style and the corresponding folder into the themes folder in windows. This is located in: C:\Windows\Resources\Themes



Once the theme is copied into this folder, you can right click on your desktop and click personalize and select the theme that you recently installed. The screen will turn monochrome, and shortly, the theme will be installed. (If you are not running Windows 7 you can also double click on the visual style. This will also load the theme.)

In many of the well designed themes, there will be other files that give you greater customization such as the explorer frame and the start orb.

To install the customized explorer frame, navigate to C:\Windows\System32. Now backup the original explorerframe.dll by either renaming it with a .bakup extension or just copy it to a safe place. Now copy the provided explorerframe.dll file and replace the old one. To do this, you will need to take ownership of this file. (To take ownership of a file, right click on it and click properties. Then go to the owners tab and change the owner to your user, and then change to security preferences to full control for your user.)

To install custom start orbs, you can either use a resource hacker to open the explorer.exe file and manually replace the start orb bitmaps, or you can replace the whole explorer.exe file if an alternate is provided. However, for this task, id reccomend downloading a start orb changer. A good one can be found at: Browsing Skins & Themes on deviantART Its a very lightweight program and well worth not having to replace the bitmaps manually.

Now you will have successfully installed a custom theme, however the fun doesn't stop here.

2. Mouse/Pointer Options
Installing custom mouse pointers is easy all you need to do is find a nice cursor pack and replace the files. to do this first find a cursor pack that you like. Again Deviant Art is a great resource as there are many well-designed custom cursors to choose from: Browsing Cursors on deviantART

Once you have downloaded a cursor pack, there will be several files inside. Each file is for a different cursor state. The use these instead of the default ones, right click on the desktop and click personalize. Then on the right side click on "Change mouse pointers." Click on a cursor state and select browse.



Now navigate to the corresponding cursor state in the custom cursor pack and click Open.



Do this for all of the different cursor states, and there you go! New cursors

3. Wallpaper
Changing the wallpaper is probably the easiest customization you can make. It can be as simple as going to Google, finding a large picture, right clicking on it and click sat as desktop background. However, we're going to get a bit more fancy.

When customizing your wallpaper, you should ideally download an image that is the same resolution as your display. For example, my maximum screen resolution is 1366 x 768. Therefore, the best looking wallpapers for my display would be 1366 pixels wide and 768 pixels tall. To find out the resolution of your display, right click on your desktop and click screen resolution.



Now you could go to Google and search for an image with these exact dimensions, but Deviant Art is much easier to navigate and I find it easier to find great looking wallpapers here: Browsing Wallpaper on deviantART

Now i'm pretty confident that every one here knows how to set an image as their wallpaper, so I won't go into it with too much detail, so if you've been living under a rock and have just discovered how to use a computer, right click on your desktop and click on personalize. There you can click on wallpaper, and navigate to where you saved your image and click open.

4. Other
Now I have covered the major customization options for windows desktops, but if your still not satisfied, and want the make your desktop more unique and cooler looking there are many more customization options:

• Rainmeter is a great tool that if used correctly can add a lot to the visual appeal of your desktop. It contains many different widgets and skins which can all be customized to your exact specifications. It takes a little know-how to create a Rainmeter skin, but I assure you, the learning curve isn't too steep and the pay off is well worth it.
• RocketDock is a docking tool that adds a Mac like dock to your desktop. It is also highly customizable with many different skins available for download. If you hide you windows taskbar and use this instead, you can create a very Mac looking desktop with the right theme
• Windows Blinds is a theme tool that you can use if the process above looks too difficult or time consuming. I'm not an advocate of this option because I like to do things myself and learn a little while i'm doing it, however, this program does work well. There are many different themes that you can download and use and the whole process is very simple. you can go from the default windows theme to something completely different in a matter of minutes, possibly seconds.
• Fences is a desktop organization tool that is used to organized desktop icons and their layout

All of these programs are free except for Windows Blinds.

If you've made it this far, please leave me positive or negative criticism as this is my first tutorial here, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Hm thanks, bookmarked for later

I had my XP Pro patched so that i could use custom themes, however every time i shut down Windows i would get a Violation of Access error and would also get the error at random time's throughout the day.
I knew it was because i had patched my system because after doing clean installs or repairs to my system i would not get this error , but as soon as i added the patch again sure enough it came back.
It did annoy me but i like the idea of all the themes i could use , there are a lot more than WB or Winstep have to offer.
Now, my question is , does this patch for Win7 64bit get these error's ? and is it easy just to unpatch it if i dont want the patcher on my system anymore.

Have a nice day

How long ago was it when you patched your XP machine? The patchers have gotten a lot more stable, so much so that I don't even think creating a restore point before starting is necessary.

The patcher that I recommended is very good. I've installed it at least 10 times all without errors. It only patches 3 files(in windows 7), and makes a backup of the original. It also has a restore feature, so on the off chance that something goes wrong, you can easy restore the files from the utility itself.

I have had Win7 for about 12mths now so i using the patch on XP before that .

Thanks for the reply

Going to try this out thanks for the info

Bookmarked this one too; Thanks

Oh, well written, top fuel you ha ha
office 2010
coach handbags
Office Professional 2007

Neat. I'll have to try this.