by Althaf Hameez

Created on: April 09, 2007   Last Updated: November 12, 2008

Got bored of having the same old blue them of Windows XP Want something different, well your the not the only one who wants his or her computer to stand out from the rest and have a spark of creativity.

There are several aspects of customizing ones desktop. I will cover these in broad strokes. All softwares mentioned have their download links at the bottom.
However some words of caution, before attempting to do any customizing.

1) Take a backup before attempting anything, it's better to be safe than sorry
2) Make sure your computer is capable of handling it. For Windows XP this means having at least 512 Mb of RAM and a processor of at least 2.4 GHz any less and you might feel the performance hit.
3) This is only for WINDOWS XP and not for any other Windows Version, attemtping this on any other version of Windows will result in unknown errors.

#THEMES
Themes are the surrounding visual style that is the core part of customizing. The coloured boxes than surround each window, the design of the start button, the colour of the taskbar and the text used on windows it's all done by the theme.
A very useful theme to have without any additional work being done is the Zune Theme by Microsoft[1], it's a black and orange theme and all it needs is running an installer. However there are several more options to choose from but it requires a bit of work.

1) First of Download UxTheme Multi-Patcher[2].
2) Run the Installer. This will patch your uxtheme.dll and allow you to use 3rd party themes.

Now that is done, head over to deviantart.com and search for some good Visual Styles, one of my favourites is Razor Black. Download it and follow the instructions on the readme that accompanies it and voila you have a new beautiful theme.

#Wallpaper
Usually themes come with their standard wallpaper but they are usually not so great. Wallpapers are some of the most downloaded items from the Internet, and their are several sites which contain wallpapers while giving you viruses as well.
When choosing a wallpaper it is good to stick to the colour scheme of your theme, instead of going with something that contrasts it greatly. Also it would be even better if you downloaded around 5 or 6 different wallpapers so you can change it regularly.

Wallpapers can be downloaded at www.deviantart.com or www.wincustomize.com

#Gadgets
If you use Vista, you'd know what Gadgets are, they are the little widgets that occupy some space on your desktop providing you with information like CPU Usage, the time, weather, RSS feeds

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