Create and Share Windows 7 Themes

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 04 Jun 2009

You may not be able to change the default wallpaper in Windows 7 Starter, but in other Windows 7 versions you are able to create a theme of your choosing, save it and then share it with the rest of the world. It seems that Microsoft has realized that users want options, plenty of options, when it comes to personalizing their PC’s looks. Consequently the Redmond-based software developer has fitted Windows 7 with some new themes (we’ve seen this as early as Win7 Beta), and has even set up the Personalize your PC web page where users can download themes, desktop backgrounds and gadgets, as well as sideshow gadget in order to customize the look of their OS.

Senior VP with the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group at Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky, comments: “I’ve received mail from many folks wanting to personalize (tweak) nearly every pixel on the screen—from border width, to title bar transparency percentage, to height of taskbar, to color/size/location of the close button (I’ve received each of these in email more than once). At the other end are customers who are enormously happy when they can easily change the background picture and color scheme, and many do. With Windows 7 we picked a group of settings that we believe represent the most satisfying settings to broadly personalize, and would also provide the most robust platform that maintains application compatibility, and made those easy to change.”

On top of that, the development team behind Windows 7 wanted to make it easy for the user to package his personalized settings, save and share them with friends or fellow Microsofties. This would mark Microsoft’s debut in bringing robust personalization and customization to a wide range of users.

“You can apply, create, and save themes directly from within the Personalization Control Panel in Windows 7. When you create a theme for Windows 7, Windows 7 collects desktop backgrounds, sounds, mouse pointers and icons and puts it into an .themepack file. That file can be shared and them theme can then be applied on another Windows 7 PC,” explains Windows Communications Manager, Brandon LeBlanc.

Additional details on how to create, save and share Windows 7 themes available here.

In related news, you might want to know that Microsoft has set an official release date for Windows 7 (details here).


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