Styling Windows XP (Part 2): How to Change the Visual Style

Windows XP hasn’t aged well—what seemed to be modern in 2001 looks a bit cartoonish and dated in 2010. If you’ve grown tired of your PC’s Windows XP look, we’ll show you how to give it a complete makeover in this second installment of our “Styling Windows XP” series. (In Part 1, the TuneUp Blog team explained how to replace the old school, boot logo with something more modern.)

Are you ready for a new, unique user interface design? Perhaps, you want to go from the classic blue-greenish Luna to a sleek, metallic look like the one shown below? Don’t worry—this is possible without patching the operating system with DLL files (which can be risky).

Changing the visual style

This process is easy and involves making only a couple of mouse-clicks.

1. All you need is TuneUp Styler (part of TuneUp Utilities, which you can try for 15 days). Download and install the program. Done? Launch it, and click on “Visual style” in the “Customize Windows” category.
2. Click on “Load visual style from a file”, and choose a third-party visual style (check out our five favorites at the end of the post). Make sure that you select the proper visual style file, which may be hidden in the downloaded style folder. You may need to look around a bit to find it, but it’s usually located in a “Theme” or “Style” folder. Note: Be aware that, in some cases, you will need to extract the downloaded files using a program like WinRAR.
   As an alternative option, you can click on “Download Visual Styles from TuneUp Online” and see what the TuneUp Visual Style Gallery has to offer.
   
3. As soon as you add the visual style, you will see a preview of it. How does it look? Click on “Apply”, and watch your entire Windows user interface change.

And, that’s it! If you don’t like the design, choose another one, or click on “Restore defaults” to go back to the original Windows XP Luna theme.

Our favorites: the top five visual styles

Since the release of Windows XP, hundreds of third-party visual styles have been made available over the Web. We’ve gathered what we think are the best of the best designs.

Inspirat SE

Royal Inspirat

Mission Aurora

OSX Tiger V Visual Style

Visty V2.0a

Check out the TuneUp Online Visual Style Web site or the popular DeviantArt Web site for many more themes.

Are you tired of the same picture that appears when you log onto and off of your computer? We’ve got the answer in Part 3 of our “Styling Windows XP” series. Check out the next post, to learn how to replace the logon screen with an exciting image.