Hack 14 Create Your Own XP Themes and Find Thousands Online
 
Customize the way XP looks and sounds, and
dress it up with themes from the best sites on the
Internet.
Themes control just about every part of the
way XP looks and sounds, including its background wallpaper, colors,
icons, cursors, sounds, fonts, screen saver, and the visual style of
its windows and buttons. By default, your computer uses the basic
Windows XP theme, which some people refer to as
Luna because it was called that during
XP's development. You can apply countless themes to
XP, though it only ships with two: the basic Windows XP theme and the
Windows Classic themea more stolid-looking theme, based on
older versions of Windows, that uses rectangular windows and solid
colors.
To
change between themes, right-click on the desktop and choose
Properties  Themes. Choose the theme you want to use from
the drop-down list, as shown in Figure 2-9. Click
on OK, and the theme will be applied.
Note that if you choose "More themes
online..." from the drop-down list, you
won't actually be able to get more themes online, so
choosing that option is a bit of a bait-and-switch. When you choose
it, you'll be sent to a web page suggesting that you
buy Microsoft Plus! for Windows XP.
There's no need to buy it if you're
looking to use more themes, though. Instead, you can make your own
and get thousands more online from non-Microsoft sites.
2.8.1 Roll Your Own Themes
If you're like me
(and most other people), you won't be happy with the
basic themes that come with XP. What good is an operating system,
after all, if you can't bend it, twist it, and make
it your own? There's no single, central place you can go to make
themes in XP. Instead, you'll have to customize each
part of XP individually and then roll it all up into a single theme.
Once your system is using all the elements of your theme, save the
theme with the following instructions. Start off by right-clicking on the desktop, choosing Properties, and
then customizing your desktop using the following tabs:
Desktop
Lets you customize the
desktop background and
color, as well as which system icons should appear on your
desktop.
Screen Saver
Lets you choose a screen saver and control its
functions and features. It also adjusts power controls for your
monitor.
Appearance
Lets you
customize the colors, style, and font size for windows, toolbars and
buttons. It also controls effects, such as whether to use fade
effects, whether to show shadows under menus, how to smooth the edges
of screen fonts, and similar effects.
Settings
Lets you choose your screen resolution, color quality, and to choose
advanced features such as the screen refresh rate.
Next, customize your mouse pointers by
typing main.cpl in the Start Run box and
pressing Enter. The Mouse Properties dialog box will appear, allowing
you to choose a preset pointer scheme or select individual pointers
you want as part of your theme. To choose system sounds for your theme, type
mmsys.cpl from the Run box
and press Enter. The Sounds and Audio Devices properties dialog box
will appear. Click on the Sounds tab and choose a preset sounds
scheme or select individual sounds for different system and program
events. When you're finished customizing, go back to the
Themes tab of the Display Properties dialog box, choose Save
As, and save the theme to either My Documents or
to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes. You can now use
the theme as you can any other.
2.8.2 Get XP Themes Online
This has been a rather roundabout
way of creating your own themes. And face it, few of us (including
myself) are visual artists or sound artists. So, even better than
rolling your own themes is going online and choosing from thousands
you can download for free from many Internet sites. Some people make
themes and post them as a hobby, many companies create themes as a
way to market products, and movies and TV shows frequently create
themes as a way to get free publicity. Or course, there are many themes you can find online that may violate
copyright laws; people create themes using
characters, sounds, and people from popular entertainment and then
post them online for others to use. The entertainment
companies' lawyers will tell you the themes are
illegal; on the other hand, others say that the themes fall under the
fair use provisions of the copyright laws. Who's
right? I don't know, and at this point,
I'm not even sure that the courts do. As to which
themes you can download and use, let your conscience be your guide. A few popular theme sites are http://www.themeworld.com, http://www.topthemes.com, and http://www.themexp.org, and the themes
section of the download site http://www.tucows.com. In addition, many
general software download sites include theme sections. Movie studios
are good places to find themes, as are web sites created for movies. Depending on the theme that you download, you may have to install it
differently, so check with the site from which you download, or check
within the download itself. As a general rule, though, to use a theme
that you download, install it into the
C:\Windows\Resources\Themes folder. Typically, a
file with the extension .theme will be installed
into that directory, and all the associated art, sound, icon,
wallpaper, and cursor files will be installed into a subfolder of
C:\Windows\Resources\Themes. Once
you've installed the new theme, choose it as
outlined previously in this hack.
2.8.2.1 These are a few of my favorite themes
My hard disk is too full of themes to list them all, but
I'll give you some of my current and all-time
favorites that I found online. I favor several Wallace & Gromit
themes from the http://www.topthemes.com site. (If you
haven't come across them before, Wallace &
Gromit are hilariously understated claymation animations from the
Oscar-winning animator Nick Park.) I must say, though, that, being an opera fan, my favorite theme of
all time is the one I found on http://www.themeworld.com, based on
Verdi's opera Don Carlo.
There's nothing like starting up your computer in
the morning and being greeted by the sweeping sounds of one of the
most dramatic operas of all time. I can almost see the Grand
Inquisitor making his way onstage, preparing to burn an idolater or
two at the stake. Figure 2-10 shows the wallpaper
from the theme, which was chosen to match the mood of the opera.
Other elements include the Startup sound taken from the orchestral
prelude of the opera's last act, the Shutdown sound
from the last seconds of the opera, and many other sounds and icons.
2.8.3 See Also
Style-XP,
shareware from TFT Soft LLC at http://www.tgtsoft.com manages your themes,
lets you automatically rotate them on a schedule, and lets you easily
customize them, among other features.
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