You want to make your Windows XP OS look like Vista or Mac.
Great, there are lots of shareware utilities that will do that for you like Stardock’s Windows Blinds or StyleXP.
That would work except your cheap and don’t want the additional system overhead those programs incur on your computer. OK well MS Plus has some themes, but again your cheap and they need to be digitally signed and MS does not seem to want to provide you with a Vista looking OS unless you want to shell out the bucks to upgrade.
The alternative is to replace your uxtheme.dll file with one that does not require themes to be digitally signed by MS (Why should they get to decide what your OS can and cannot look like on your own personal machine?). Do that and you open a world of theme possibilities.
Steps:
- Download the uxtheme.dll from SoftPedia
- Do a search for uxtheme.* on your machine.
- Rename all occurrences of uxtheme.* (ie. uxtheme.dll) to uxtheme_backup.* (Except for the one you jujst downloaded of course)
- Copy the downloaded uxtheme.dll file over to your Windows/System32 directory
- Restart your computer
- Check to make sure that the uxtheme.dll file in the Windows/System32 directory has the date of the patched file rather then the original.
- Upon success go to a site like http://www.winmatrix.com to download compatible themes.
If you have trouble replacing the uxtheme.dll file, please see this in-depth article on TechRecipies which has instructions that should help.
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