BenBishop.me.uk

With Apple’s OSX and the advent of Vista, Windows XP has begun to look really pretty stale and dated. This is understandable for an operating system that has been available for nearly 5 years but there’s a pretty simple stop gap solution that can keep us going until the next big Windows release.

The Energy Blue Theme originally came with Windows Media Center 2005 and then was released as part of an ‘Enhancment Pack’ for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. This slick and fresh theme has since been made available as a seperate download (one of the Tablet PC’s power toys) from Microsoft, but still no release for XP Home or Pro.

This theme is compatible with XP you just need to do a little more work to install it.

1. Download the theme direct from Microsoft or through File Forum and save to your desktop. If you attempt to install the theme by clicking on the executable, Windows pops up with a message informing us we are not using Tablet PC. You will need to extract the files into a folder using Winzip or in my case WinRar and manually install the applicable files. The easiest way to accomplish this if you have Winrar installed is to ‘right-click’ on the file and click to ‘Extract to….’ as shown though I’d expect Winzip to have similar functionality. Open the folder containing the extracted files.
2. Open ‘My Computer’ or ‘Explorer’ and navigate to the Themes folder, normally found on the C drive (‘C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes’). Create a ‘royale’ folder.
3. Copy the ‘royale.theme’ file from the extracted folder into the Themes folder on your computer.
4. Open the ‘royale’ folder and create two more folders, ‘shell’ and ‘wallpaper’.
5. Copy the ‘royale.msstyles’ file to the ‘royale’ folder and copy the ‘energybliss.jpg’ file to the wallpaper folder.
6. Open the ‘shell’ folder and create the following folders; ‘homestead’, ‘metallic’, ‘normalcolor’ and ‘royale’.
7. Copy the ‘shellstyle.dll’ file to each of these subfolders.
8. Right click on the desktop and go to properties. On the theme tab, from the drop down menu, select the newly installed Energy Blue Theme.

At this point its also worth getting some better wallpaper than the one included with this theme (its as bad as the luna wallpaper that comes standard with Windows). Veer has a quality selection, found here.