How to brighten up your Windows UI

There are tons of methods that try to make the good ol’ Windoze XP Fisher-Price user interface look at least a little better. I’m gonna post up my favorite Windows GUI hacks that I use, and how to apply them right here on this post. I will add more and more things over time.

Most of these apply only to Windows XP.

I. Simple Stuff

Change your wallpaper

Change your desktop wallpaper into one of these (scroll down). I used the ‘SkyDrive’ windows thing for all of them. (Note the ‘Full Pack’ doesn’t contain all of the images. )

Alternatively, you could just try my activedesktop tutorial.

Turn off boring and unnoticed special FX

Another thing you can do is to turn off the built in Windows XP special FX that you don’t need. At first glance, you may think that windows doesn’t have any special effects turned on by default, but upon closer inspection… you still can’t really notice any. They just eat up RAM and annoy you.

To do this, right klik on the desktop and select ‘Properties’ from the dropdown menu. Go to the ‘Appearance’ tab, and click on the ‘Effects’ button. Uncheck everything you don’t want (or don’t notice) then click OK. I usually turn off everything except for ‘cleartype’. It doesn’t exactly make your computer look BETTER, but it certainly makes it run faster, so it gives us some more room for eyecandy that we actually notice.
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Organizing folders

Coming soon…

II. Harder Hurdles

Secret Royale theme pack

-Now you can actually start REALLY changing the way windows looks. Go to istartedsomething.com and go to the Secret Royale Noir XP Theme post and download the zip. (Or the .rar if you have a good file extractor and a bad ‘net conection ) Follow the instructions in the little box below the download linx.
Here are the instructions copied from the website:

1. Extract files to “C:\windows\resources\themes\royale noir”
2. Double click on “luna.msstyles”
3. Select “Noir” from “Color Scheme”

Adding right click entries

- While this one doesn’t really affect how your UI looks, it still adds a whole lot of functionality and can save you from some really tedious work. Open up windows explorer ( Just dubble klik on ‘My Computer’. ) Navigate the menubar and dialogs:

Tools > Folder Options _ File types

Select the filetype you want to add a right click entry to from the gigantic listbox. You can get details for the selected filetype in the textbox below.
You might think to click the ‘new’ button, but that will just register a new filetype to the already bloated list. Instead, when you find the right filetype, click the ‘advanced’ button.
From the new window that pops up, you can now see all of the custom entries that external applications have added to the right click menu automatically. You can edit and delete them if you want. For now, just click ‘New…’
In the dialog that pops up you can enter the properties of what you want the right click entry to do. In the ‘Action’ textbox, type in the text you want to see in the right click listing. In the other one, click the ‘Browse…’ button and browse to the executable you want it to execute when the listing is pushed. Or, if it’s a windows executable, just type it in. ( e.g. cmd.exe would be the command prompt that is preinstalled with windows.)

You can also do this by editing the registry.

NOTE: WHENEVER EDITING THE REGISTRY, YOU SHOULD BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL. IT CAN SEVERELY DAMAGE YOUR SYSTEM. WHENEVER IN REGEDIT, YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BACK UP THE REGISTRY BEFORE YOU EDIT VALUES BY CLICKING FILE>EXPORT AND THEN SAVING THE FILE SOMEWHERE. IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG, DOUBLE CLICK ON THE FILE AND IT WILL BE REVERTED TO HOW IT WAS BEFORE.

On the startmenu, click ‘run…’ and run regedit.exe.
On the lefthand pane in the program that comes up, navigate to ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT’ and find the file extention you are looking for. If you want it to appear in everything, open up the ‘*’ folder. If there is a ‘Shell’ folder, make a key inside of that named what you want the right-click listing to say, and make yet another key inside of that one named ‘command’. Open it up and double click on the ‘default’ key that was automatically put there, and type in the exacutable you want it to execute when clicked.

Swapping Icons

Swapping icons for individual files is fast and easy. Right click on a folder and click properties. In the dialog that pops up, click the ‘customize’ tab. There, you can edit various things about the appearance of the folder.
If you want to change system icons, then right click on the desktop and click properties. On the ‘desktop’ tab, click the customize button and then select the system icon you want to change in the selector menu in the box that pops up. Click the change icon button and find the icon that you want, or push the browse button to find other icons. (Remember to select ‘All’ from the bottom selector box to be able to see all your images. )

And if you are REALLY serious about how things look on windows, check out this FAQ for links to free windoze XP skins and how to make your own.  As it states in the tutorial, you must download a patch for windows xp. Running the executable makes your UI blow up and causes windows error messages to fly. Kind of what you would expect if you had a virus. I can assure you that it doesn’t do anything malicious. It just replaces a locked system DLL with one that allows third party imput, then restarts.

III. External Applications

Firefox skins

… Aren’t really necessary, but do lighten up your browser if you are using a dark desktop theme. For example: if I use the Windows XP Zune theme on my desktop, my web browser will look out of place.  So I can get a user-created skin for Firefox that will make it look more like the rest of windows. Skins are easy to find and use. You can get them here, or directly from the firefocks website. It can be kind of hard to find firefox 3 compatible themes, though, since some of the devs still haven’t updated their code.

–And if you aren’t using firefox yet, drop everything and get it right now.

Clipboard enhancement

Again- this doesn’t really make it look any better, but it adds some functionality. Unfortunately, unless you use MS Word or something, Windows XP does not have this feature in its operating system by default, so you have to go and find software that will do it for you. I use clipdiary. This is only really useful if you are moving files around a lot, so if you know you won’t use it, don’t get it.

Launcy

Launchy is a nifty little app that runs in the background until you push a hotkey ( which is, by default, “alt+space.” ) Then this nice little black glossy window pops up. You type the name of an application in and hit enter, then launchy it runs it! Launchy accurately calls itself a ‘keystroke application launcher’, but it can also search the web [or specific websites] , browse your computers folders, and more. It’s a whole lot faster than the Start Menu in XP, and looks nicer. You can get it here, along with some skin packs and plugins.

RocketDock

RocketDock claims to be “The single greatest piece of software. Ever.” Ironic that what makes it useful is other applications. It is a dock program, as its name implies. It’s like ObjectDock, only its opensource and it isn’t crippleware. It can even run the same plugins and docklets ( Dock-applets ) and it’s not dead.

If you don’t know what a dock is, examine this screenie to see what my RocketDock looks like :

Screenshot of my rocketdock

It looks kind of like that bar on the bottom of mac desktops. Use is fairly straightforward, but I will put something up on it later. Get RocketDock here. You might want to get the stacks docklet also. Put everything in the zip file inside the ‘C:/Program Files/Rocket Dock/Docklets’ folder.

KKmenu how-to Coming soon…

This will be described somewhere else. It gets incredibly annoying if you lack ram. [gets really slow]

Disposing of the Windows Explorer-Sidebar Coming soon…