Pimp yo’ XP Desktop

Jealous of Lunux geeks and Mac weenies with their bling-bling desktops? Stuck with a Fisher-Price desktop from mothercare? Then worry ye not, for ’tis time for the SnakeOil Labs guide to pimping your XP rig.

If you’ve come from a Windows 9x background, you may remember what it was like to have desktop themes. Ah yes, endless hours frittered away dialled up to the Internet, downloading themes from Tucows. Sure it looked a little clunky, but what the heck.

For Windows XP, Microsoft added all the things you need for theme-related goodness: Transparent windows, rounded corner support and so on, but spoilt it all by requiring themes to be signed by Microsoft in order to install them. Well, as you’d imagine there’s a way around this. That way is UXPatcher (Mirrored here - Thanks Krz!). What this does is patch the uxtheme.dll file used by your version of XP/2003. Installing this requires a reboot as XP will whinge about overwriting essential system files.

Once you’ve rebooted, it’s time to head over to deviantART. The quality is hugely variable, but there’s always something new. I have a particular soft spot for b0se’s themes.

InterfaceLIFT has a nice selection of XP Styles to choose from but it seems like what there is to offer is a bit limited. Bfarber.com has a lot more to choose from, I think LightStar’s selection are amongst the best on the site. You’ll need to register to download the themes.

Over at GetSkinned there’s a huge range of MS XP Styles to choose from. I really like RacerX minimal.

Once you’ve found a theme you like, you can install them by copying the themes over to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes, as long as you have a .theme file. Sometimes you’ll get an MSStyle file instead. In this case you can bring the theme up by double-clicking on it.

The sites linked to above have all kinds of other goodies, such as replacement XP startup and shutdown screens, wallpapers, icon sets and so on. What’s on your desktop?