How to Change Your Desktop Theme
Desktop themes let you to personalize Windows XP’s look. Changing your theme differs from changing your wallpaper in that it alters the way your toolbars and task bar and dialog boxes look—color, special shading effects and, in some cases, Windows’ sound events. We’ve seen themes for the New York Yankees, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and more—all for free on the ‘Net
And it’s so easy to do:
Open the Display Properties dialog by:
- Right-clicking on your desktop and choose “Properties” (at the bottom)
- Go to Start>Control Panel>Appearance & Themes, select “Change the desktop background”.
- The Display Properties dialog has five tabs along the top; click on the “Themes” tab.
- You’ll see a small representation of your desktop with a sample dialog box.
- On the left, near the top, you’ll see a drop-down box; clicking the box shows you the default theme options such as “Windows XP”, “Windows Classic” (this last one makes your computer look like Windows 98.
- Selecting the “more themes online” takes you to the Microsoft Plus! homepage, but there don’t appear to be any free themes linked there.
- A better option is searching the Web; this search for “free desktop themes xp” on Google yields over a million hits.
- To use one of these themes, download it to your desktop and unzip it.
- Select “Browse” from the drop-down list and navigate to the new theme’s folder; the open dialog box will only show you Windows’ theme files.
- Select your theme file and click OK.
- You should see a sample of the theme in the little desktop.
- Click “Apply” to make sure you like the way the theme looks on your computer; if you like it, click OK. If you don’t, you can always go back to the “Windows XP” default theme by way of the Display Properties dialog.
It’s that simple.
Updated: November 18, 2005