Installing Custom Themes on Windows XP
The blue Windows XP theme gets boring. As does the silver and olive green one. As does the Zune one you downloaded from Microsoft. This tutorial will explain how to install a custom Windows theme. For this tutorial, you must have a patched UXTheme.dll. We’ll be installing a nice areao4.2 theme we found on DeviantArt. Your desktop will end up looking like the one to the left (or should come close).
Download the Theme
Click Download. It doesn’t get much more simple than that.
Installing the Theme
DeviantArt spit a ZIP file on us. Extract it, so you’ll end up with a folder with the same name as the ZIP file.
Time to find the file. Dig into the new folder, and find a file called “areao4.msstyle”
Double click it. A Display Properties window should popup, with the new theme selected. Click OK.
If it doesn’t show up with the theme, you most likely do not have the UXTheme patch applied.
That’s it! For a more permanent place to keep the folder containing the MSSTYLE, right click and Cut/Copy it and paste it into C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes\.
I'm Jason, the main author of Third Error, and many of the topics I'll focus on concern Windows (and applicable software), web applications, web design, and a bit of *nix (Ubuntu mainly). My computer runs Windows XP, with virtualized Ubuntu and OS X handy.