Just out of curiosity. How many people stuck with the default XP color theme and the blue taskbar? One of the first things I did was set my taskbar back to the older neutral color, but I noticed the Planetside icon, when placed in the quicklaunch bar, looks more like a widget than a program icon at first glance since it blends in with the gray. It probably looks better against the blue.
First thing I did was switch back to Windows Classic look and feel; I hate XP’s look. XP has the same “translucent plastic” look that makes me dislike Aqua on Mac OS X.
/mydesktop.JPG)
Hah, halfway expected it would be Brad W. showing off the “Aqua” theme as a plug for his Windows Blinds. :)
p.s. I didn’t go with the default color scheme. I like the Olive Green taskbar combined with the Autumn Leaves wallpaper. Very nice visual combo there.
Ditto for me. I think the XP Look & Feel is designed to draw attention to the Operating System – “Look I’m running XP isn’t that cool.” That makes sense from a marketing standpoint but not from a usability standpoint. From a usability standpoint, the OS should stay in the background and make itself as unobtrusive as possible. The brightly colored XP window frames call attention to themselves when they should stay muted. What’s worse is that the window frames in XP are big and fat and take up more space on my desktop than the old window frames. Like Qenan, I switched back to the Classic Look the first day I got XP.
Normally I’m something of a curmudgeon about window styles, but I took to the XP default scheme right away. Kind of surprising to me, but I haven’t changed it since.
I use litestep instead of the default explorer shell, so I don’t have a taskbar in the strickest sense. What I do have, a popup menu activated by right-clicking on the desktop and a line of tasks at the bottom of the screen are grey, though they can be blue, green or brown if I want.
I turned off the Windows XP stuff and am using a 2000 classic look. My desktop is fairly utilitarian but has everything I need.
I don’t spend much time on the desktop anyway so I don’t need all the fancy stuff.
[quote=“Woolen Horde”]Hah, halfway expected it would be Brad W. showing off the “Aqua” theme as a plug for his Windows Blinds. :)[quote]
I use a little proggie called StyleXP to enable 3rd party theme support in Windows XP. If you’re not lazy, you can change some system files to accomplish the same.
I do use a Stardock product, ObjectX, to provide me with the Aqua-style dock at the bottom of my screen.
/myDock.jpg)
You can run any theme you want if you do this:
http://www.belchfire.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=186
Also, I was able to replace the uxtheme.dll by following these steps:
- Get the hacked dll and put it in a temp directory.
- Ctrl-C it to get it in the clipboard.
- Go to the System32 directory and find the real uxtheme.dll.
- Highlight it and hit F2 to rename.
- Give it a different extension.
- Immediately hit Ctrl-V.
- Hopefully it gets copied before Windows File protection replaces it.
- Repeat until you get it.
- Reboot and use any style you want.
It is definitely ghetto but it saves you from having to deal with the recovery console.
The site I have gotten all of my themes from is Themexp.org.
– Xaroc
I use Style XP, will put up a screen shot eventually… thought about messing around with the Stardock stuff, though I heard it was pretty memory-intensive.
— Alan
I also employed the method Xaroc describes to unlock XP’s visual styles. I don’t mind the Luna interface, per se, but none of the colors is neutral or bright enough for my needs. The default blue style is colorful, but it’s tough to do image editing or color correcting when all of your Photoshop documents are surrounded by a flourescent blue border. The silver theme is a little better, but I find it a bit too dark, and it’s predominated by that depressing “battleship gray” color that makes classic Windows so ugly.
I like parts of the Mac Aqua theme–it’s a bright interface that is mostly neutral with splashes of color. But I hate the font that most of the Aqua visual styles use (I much prefer the Luna fonts), and I hate the horizontal lines running through everything.
So I designed my own theme–sort of a minimalist mix between Luna and Aqua, and much less cluttered than either. I like it. :)
I’ve been watching those arms and armor shows on TLC and I know for a fact that the plate metal pornmail that that chick is wearing to fight the dragon is not going to protect her armpits very well.
Don’t worry. She’s wearing it in an effort to turn Sean Tudor on.
Running Windowx XP with all the glitzy stuff turned off, and some menu speed tweaks. Not because my computer cannot handle it, but I just can’t stand that animations, etc,
As you probably can tell, I hate desktop icons…with a passion :D
I like how you watch Fast and the Furious whilst playing DaoC. 
p.s. - BSPlayer rocks.
I use the good old classic style.
And yes, I have too many icons, and my desktop is in dire need of a change. But it’s my laptop, so I don’t use it too often other than to play games at work.
I think GMicek revealed some gayness for the viewing public there.
Windows98SE in all of its glory:
BTW, what do you use to screenshot the entire desktop like that?
DIE! Anyway, here’s my desktop’s…uhh…desktop just so I can redeem myself a little. Check the killer games. Fable, Chain Reaction, Tennis Critters, Kraken, Imperial Wars, Dark Signs, BaseGolf.
