I was never that of a theme fanatic and used the windows classic setting on all of my previous computers because I thought it would speed up my system. I feel a little bit old fashioned to defend this stance against my friends who love to use themes for their windows operating system. It is not anymore a question of speeding up the system, with dual core cpus and gigabytes of ram available for most computers that are sold these days.
I did find a great theme pretty quickly which does look better than the Windows Vista Basic Theme if you ask me. The only thing that I had to change was the wallpaper image which did not look that great. I would like to begin by explaining a common error that I received while trying to enable a theme other than the windows classic theme. The error was “The theme could not be loaded because the theme service is not running”. I hit Windows + R, entered services.msc and hit enter again. The theme service was not started and i set it to automatically start at Windows startup and started it as well immediately.
The problem was that the message was still there when I tried to activate another theme. I decided to try a reboot which fixed the problem. I could activate other themes without problems.
If you do not know how to activate themes do the following:
- Right-Click the desktop and select properties
- Select the Themes Tab
- All of your themes are located in the Theme pulldown menu
- To activate a theme select it and click Apply

The Zune theme for Windows XP can be downloaded from this official link.
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