New Skins for XP with Visual Styles

I see a lot of people with XP using the Windows XP Style look. That's probably mostly due to the fact that XP defaults to it. I personally think it's ugly as crap, so it was the first thing to go when i switched over to XP; I prefer the Windows Classic look.

For some reason, Microsoft thought it was an awesome idea to only let you choose "Windows XP Style" or "Windows Classic Style." Any option for 3rd parties to make there own themes was locked out.

These options can be found if you right click the desktop, go to Properties | Appearance and look under "Windows and buttons."

I'm going to tell you how to patch XP to allow you to load up 3rd party "Visual Styles," or skins.

It's easy!

1. Download Uxtheme Multi-patcher and patch your uxtheme.dll to open up your system for these changes. In other words, just download it and run it.

2. Download new themes! A good place to start looking is deviantart.com. Look here on the site: Customization / Skins & Themes / Windows Utilities / Visual Styles.

3. Extract the new theme to the following directory: C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes. You'll find one theme already here, Luna. That's the XP theme.

4. Right click the desktop. Go to Preference | Appearance and Choose your new visual theme under "Windows and buttons." That's it! Most themes come with several color schemes to choose from aswell.

That's all!

Here are a couple visual styles i have found that I like:

Pucko - This is the theme that I am currently using, and liking a lot! I found it looking for a theme that was simular to Ubuntu's Glider theme; I actually like this more. It's simple, sleak, and very usable! It also [thankfully!] does not sport the small caps that the screen shots show.

CodeOpus - This is also a very nicely done theme, it's just a little too bubbly for me though. Worth checking out though, thus the reason I mentioned it.

I tried some others, but a lot of them are matched up with horrible fonts, or are just terrible on the eyes. So be warned!


Want to Change your icons to better match your new look?
Use IconTweaker, it's free and automatically comes with some pretty good sets.

One last note: There are, of course, other ways to change the look of Windows. one of which is WindowsBlinds. I like the way I descibed here for two reasons: It's free and you don't have to have another App running in the background.

Enjoy!