denyerec.co.uk

For those of you who tired quickly of Microsoft’s eye-punishing bright blue colourscheme, you may or may not be aware that there are alternatives. The obvious ones are the “Olive” and “Silver” themes available in your display properties dialog, or you could revert back to the Win2K look if you’re feeling retro.

If however you fancy something else, help is at hand. Handily, this isn’t some crazy WindowsBlinds GUI overhaulling thing that will crash your PC and scare your grandparents, what I am on about uses WindowsXP’s native “styling engine”.

Currently I am using the Opus 1.5 theme by a chap called Bose. It comes in 3 colours, one of which being olive green so I’m all set.

To use these funky “MSStyles” you need a modified DLL patcher which you can download from the Neowin Forums. It’s quite safe, but it might violate a EULA somewhere along the line, modifying MS files and whatnot. Ho hum.

Neowin have a bunch of themes in their forums too, for those who don’t like Bose’s.