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Popular Windows XP TV Themes

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:21:49 +0000

My article yesterday explained how to patch the file uxtheme.dll in Windows to be able to add custom themes to Windows. Today I’m going to introduce popular TV Themes for Windows XP that you can use if you have patched the file. You will see some wonderful creative themes centering around a tv show or character, wonderful if you are a fan and would like to use a theme that brings you closer to the show or the character.

Expect Windows XP themes of Spiderman, Superman, Batman, Dragonball, The Simpsons, Fantastic 4 and The Flash. Let me explain how you install those themes. Once you have patched the uxtheme.dll you need to unpack the themes that you download into the Windows/Resources/Themes folder. When that is done double-click the .mstyles file which should open the Appearance tab in Display Properties. Click Apply and you are all set.

You sometimes have the choice between several styles for Windows and Buttons as well as Color Schemes. Use the pulldown menus on the left to see if that is the case for the selected theme.

Dragon Ball no off skin by ~teoiron on deviant ART

Spiderman no off skin by ~teoiron on deviant ART

Superman no off skin by ~teoiron on deviant ART

The Simpsons no off skin by ~teoiron on deviant ART

Batman no off skin by ~teoiron on deviant ART

Fantastic four no off skin by ~teoiron on deviant ART

The Flash no off skin by ~teoiron on deviant ART

Microsoft Brazilian Beaches Themes for XP

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 08:09:39 +0000

Microsoft Brazilian Beaches, also called Microsoft Praias do Brasil, is a theme collection that contains four themes for Windows XP. All four do change the general appearance of Windows XP including the background image which is showing an image of a Brazilian beach with additional information attached.

The color scheme for menus is changed as well using bright colors that remind me of sand and sun. I personally do not like the background images that much but the color scheme itself is very eye friendly. Several icons are exchanged as well. The My Computer icon for instance has been changed into a sunshade.

I personally would do a search on Flickr for Brazilian beaches and find a more suitable image for the background and leave all other settings as they are. This would also get rid of the big Microsoft logo in the lower right corner of the desktop.

Please click on one of the smaller pictures to see a full size version of it:

Praias Buzios:

Praias Florianapolis:

Praias Jericoacoara:

Praias Noronha:

Windows XP Zune Theme

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 04 May 2007 11:39:25 +0000

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.