Windows XP Zune Theme

I was never that of a theme fanatic and used the windows classic setting on all of my previous computers because I always felt that using larger themes would slow down my system. I sacrifice a theme that may look more beautiful for speed.

I feel a little bit old fashioned to defend this stance against my friends who love to install themes on their Windows operating systems. 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 was then able to 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.

Note: The way you load themes in Windows 7 and newer versions of the operating system has changed. While you still right-click on the desktop, you select personalize now from the context menu. You are taken to a screen where you can make modifications to the current theme, or load a new one.