Tuesday's Tech Tip: Freshen up Windows XP's look

As promised, today is about freshening up Windows XP's look (for free). Here's my XP desktop (click it to enlarge):



REMEMBER: This tip is for Windows XP users! Not Windows Vista, Windows 2000, or, God help us, Windows 95.

The theme. First, let's replace your blue default theme (the one that makes your start bar and windows look like they were made by Fisher Price). You'll need to download and install Microsoft's "Zune" theme. You can download it free from Microsoft here.

Save it to your desktop and run it to install it (you can erase the file when it's done installing). Okay, right-click on an empty spot on your desktop and select "Properties" on the menu that pops up. Your Appearance panel opens up to your themes tab. Select "Zune" from the drop down list for theme. Click apply, OK, etc. until the window closes. That's done.

The cursors. Second, let's pretty up your cursors with an anti-aliased Vista look. Download the Vista cursors from Alan Le's page. Unzip them, right-click on -- oh, just follow the directions posted here.

The wallpaper. My wallpaper is slightly modified version of Flora Nine by Delta 909. You can download the appropriate size for your monitor here.

Widgets. How about Vista-style widgets? You know, like a current weather widget, a stock ticker widget or even a today-at-a-glance widget that can pull info from Outlook? You can try the (free) Yahoo Widgets. Download Yahoo Widgets here. It will install a sampling of widgets. There are many ways to customize how widgets work and behave, so play around with it. Please note that this sits in your memory, so uninstall it if you feel your PC's speed took a hit.

That's it. And that's it. I like this freshening up because it's pretty innocuous -- no weird system hacks or anything (heck, the Zune theme is from Microsoft itself). I don't use Yahoo Widgets anymore (Yahoo Widgets is a pretty program, but I didn't need it), but the other stuff is straight-forward.

As always, let me hear your feedback as to whether this was helpful or you liked the tip.