Sorry about that. Post a Comment. Tuesday, February 06, In an upcoming article I needed to explain how to change the look of Windows XP. Unfortunately the steps to do this are among the most convoluted on the planet, though anyone who has been through the ritual a couple of times will know the drill. So I thought it best to create a separate article for the purpose. Read on, brave interface tweakers! As an example, say we want to change two background colours, in order to make the window interface match some custom content we have designed.
By an astounding coincidence, this is precisely what I wish to do in the foobar article that references this one. Start by right-clicking on your desktop and selecting "Properties" from the context menu. Thanks for your feedback.
I have already tried the first two options, and they were not any better. The high contrast themes were just as bad, if not worse. When I turned the screen brightness down it turned everything down, not just the background. I've also looked at third party themes, with no luck. What I would really like to be able to do is to customise my colours using something similar to the Advanced Appearance Settings form Windows 7.
I had made a colour scheme with a light pink background in application windows, which suited me and was easy on my eyes. Oh, sorry to hear that, I have no other option. Get your eyes off the screen for a minute every 30 minutes. For years I've set my Active Window colour to be much more restful - didn't take Rocket Science, just plain, common sense!! I've also been advising people to do this for years, so there'll be quite a few people who'll want to know why some dumb person dropped this VITAL control.
Sensible people always look away from the screen on a regular basis, but that doesn't mean that we also don't want to adjust the colours. I had a very similar problem. I wanted to change the background cell color in Excel to grey. What I did was edit the registry.
There are different ways into Display Properties, but one of the quickest is to right-click on the open desktop no icon or window selected and select Properties. The main area to make changes is on the Appearance tab and includes a number of changes seen below. There are four new buttons: a skin from disk, a skin, launches the stand-alone WindowBlinds program and the Gamma Adjustment. The button now has a new screen of features. Only the button is the same.
The pull-down menus include: "Windows and buttons" which displays a list of WindowBlinds Visual Styles skins , "Color scheme" includes the Substyles and "Font size" remains the same. To change the skin, simply click on the pull-down menu under "Windows and buttons" and select the desired skin.
The preview will be updated with that skin, then click on to update your desktop. Clicking will apply the changes and close Display Properties. While clicking will abort any changes and close Display Properties. To change the substyle for the selected skin if any exist , click on the "Color scheme" pull-down menu and select the desired substyle.
The preview will be updated with the new color scheme and clicking will change your desktop. If a skin doesn't have any available substyles, the pull-down menu will be grayed out. After clicking the Gamma Adjustment button, the following window opens which includes options to change the: colouring, gamma similar to contrast , invert colours and even remove all colouring i. You can also select options from the "Default Colour Levels" pull-down menu. Clicking will save changes, while will cancel and close.
Clicking the button will open the "Gamma Adjustment" window. Watch the preview change as you move the slider. If you uncheck the box at the top for "Enable Colouring", you won't be able to change the colouring. Finally, you can also click the button to display a full colour picker window. Then click to accept the colour. Clicking or will abort and close the window. Clicking or will abort changes and close the window.
Your choices for changing the font size under the "Font size" pull-down menu are very limited. However, you can override skin settings under the button, which will be covered later under "Advanced Settings" in this Appendix. The choices in the "Font size" pull-down menu are standard Windows XP choices. To add a new skin from your hard-drive, click the button and an Explorer window will open.
Use it to locate the new skin file. WBA or. When you apply the new color, the taskbar doesn't change color. It is still the same blue color that is the default for the Windows XP style. So, the Windows XP style overrides any custom color you try to apply to the taskbar and Start menu by changing the color of 3D Objects.
In addition, the Windows XP style overrides any custom colors you try to apply to the active and inactive window title bars. Most of the other custom settings provided by the Advanced Appearance dialog box including font changes can be applied even if you have selected the Windows XP style, but creating a completely custom theme requires that you select the Windows Classic style on the Appearance tab.
To modify the Windows XP style to any great extent, you need skinning software that enables you to modify and create visual styles that can then be applied to Windows. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 examine creating your own skins using skin and visual style editors. Now, let's backtrack for a moment and use the Windows Classic style so we can completely customize the colors for all the items found in the Advanced Appearance dialog box we will also look at how each setting affects the GUI.
The Windows Classic style offers a greater number of color schemes as compared to the three offered by the Windows XP style. To select a ready-made color scheme for your theme, click the Color Scheme drop-down list see Figure 4. Select one of the color schemes to apply it to your theme. The Windows Classic style offers a greater number of color schemes.
Now you can modify any of the color scheme elements, including the font type and color used by the desktop and title bars, using the Advanced Appearance tab. If you are satisfied with one of the provided color schemes for your theme, you are ready to move to the next step, which is modifying the mouse pointer.
This is covered in the next section. However, if you want to create a custom color scheme, read on. You can click an item in the sample box provided by the dialog box it shows the desktop, an active window, an inactive window, and a message box.
Or you can use the Item drop-down list to select an item and change its color and font attributes. The 3D Object and other custom item settings are found in the Advanced Appearance dialog box. Let's break down the Item drop-down list so you know what you are modifying when you select a particular item:. You can also change the font color for 3D objects.
Active Title Bar Controls the active title bar colors colors 1 and 2, which create a gradient on the title bar , the font type for example, Tahoma, the default, versus a number of other font families , the font size, and the font color.
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