Paintbits

Modify your Windows 7 Visual Style

Windows 7 has been recently made available to the public. It’s undeniable that W7 (will be mentioned as W7 from now on) looks good out of the box. If you used Vista before the differences are not as big as if you upgraded from Windows XP, but they are there. One of them and probably the most prominent, it’s the new taskbar, called SuperBar in W7. While the visual of the new Windows might last for some time in your Desktop, if you’re like me you will grow tired of it and you’ll start thinking in replacing it, changing it to something more suited to your taste.

What do we need?

Just like in Windows XP and Vista we need to find a way to “hack” the default Visual style. This means applying universal theme patcher. The one I successfully used in my Windows 7 Installation was this one: Universal Theme Patcher. Pay attention to the file you need to apply because it differs from 32bit to 64bit.

Choose the corresponding patcher based on you Windows:
For 32bit(x86): UniversalThemePatcher-x86.exe
For 64bit(amd64): UniversalThemePatcher-x64.exe

After the Patch…

Download a Visual Style from DeviantArt or any other place (currently I’m using ClearScreen for Windows 7), read the authors instructions (normally extract the theme to: “C:\Windows\Resources\Themes”) and happy customization. You’ll probably see that from Vista and XP to W7 some things changed on how the themes apply to the system, specifically how the taskbar start menu button is handled by the windows files. Now, contrary to how it was in Vista and XP, the taskbar button PNG’s dont’ come included in the .msstyle file, rather you need to replace the file explorer.exe (if the author of the theme packed one) in order to completely change the aspect of the taskbar. For that you’ll probably need to take ownership of the explorer.exe file, rename it so you can re-use it later to restore the original look if you somehow want to. Anyway it’s pretty lame the way Microsoft handled the theming of Windwos7 compared to how XP and Vista was.

Despite this “flaws” Windows 7 looks great, but it can even look better if you apply a new theme to your system. I did…

Download: Universal Theme Patcher

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