Tired of the same old basic Windows theme on your computer? Here's a step-by-step guide to changing the look and feel of it — transforming your computer's look-and-feel into what you want it to be!

Windows XP only has a few built-in themes that you can use, but there are quite a number of websites available on the internet from where you can download themes.

For now, let's just focus on learning how to select a new theme, before we go into how to get a different one:

  1. Right-click with your mouse on your computer's desktop and select "Properties".
  2. Before we go any further, let's save your current theme — under the "Themes" tab, click on the button "Save As", browse to where you'd like to save your current theme, give it a name, and then click on "Save".
  3. Now to try another one — still under the "Themes" tab, you'll see a drop-down menu under the heading "Theme". Here you can select one of the options (the default one is "Windows XP") and then Windows will load a preview so that you can see what it's like. At the moment you will only be able to choose between "Windows XP" and "Windows Classic" — the "More themes online..." option has been discontinued by Microsoft.
  4. So for now, click on "Windows Classic", and wait for the preview to finish loading.
  5. Click on "Apply". Your desktop theme will now change.
  6. If you're happy with it, click on "OK". If not, repeat steps 3 to 5, but instead selecting the theme that you saved in step 2.

Ok, so now you have a rough idea of how to switch between different themes. Of course, now you want to try out more themes — these you'll have to search for on the internet and download.

When you search for a theme on the internet, what you want are the ones that include the whole package in one. To explain this step better, we'll make use of one theme that I found on www.themeworld.com:

  1. Go to this page.
  2. Click on the "Free Download" button. Find a place on your hard drive where you'd like to store it — I suggest you create a sub folder in your My Documents folder which you can use for all your downloaded themes.
  3. When the file has finished downloading, browse on your hard drive to where the file is located and open it. Double-click on the file "Night Vistas.exe".
  4. Follow the installation instructions, but when you get to the option where the installation programme asks you where you want to extract the files to, browse and select the folder that you created in step 2 instead.
  5. When you're done installing this file, go back to your desktop, right-click with your mouse, and select "Properties".
  6. From the drop-down menu under the "Theme" heading, select "Browse" and then browse to your themes folder.
  7. Select one of the files that has a ".Theme" extension to it, e.g. "Night Vistas — London 1024.Theme". (If your screen size is 800x600, then choose "Night Vistas — London 800.Theme" instead.)
  8. Click on "Apply" after the preview has loaded.
  9. Click on "OK".

And there you go! If you want to try out other themes, I suggest you try a couple on www.themeworld.com, which follows the same process as that described above, until you're more familiar with the process, before you try other websites.

Have fun!