Not sure about you but I’m getting quite tired of the WinXP look and am not in the business to upgrade to Vista. Yet, I want my PC to look better, not so clunky. Especially since I now run my meanwhile ancient laptop on Windows again.

Look Ma, New Clothes

One thing I love about Linux is the ease and freedom with which I can change the look and feel. You might think big deal, who cares. Well, I want to have the option to look at a desktop environment that I select, not someone else. And let’s face it, the XP look is ugly. I never liked it.

You can of course buy programs like Blinds (or whatever the name is). I tried it a couple years ago and I had the feeling that it wasn’t all that stable. You could buy an extra pack from MS, which is not available anymore. They want you to upgrade. You also can download a certain dll file (patched uxtheme.dll)  which will overwrite the original and allow you to change themes at will.

Royalty

A nice theme for windows, which is close to the Luna look, is Royale [1]. It is an official theme and can be used without any extra work. Just install and select it in your theme selector.

How to select: Right click in an empty area of your desktop, select Properties and go to the Theme tab and select the theme Royale. After clicking Apply or OK you are all set.

The theme seems to run stable. I use it at work and also on my laptop. No issues at all.

Oh – Those Drab Folders

If you ever worked on a MAC you probably are familiar with the option to select different colors for your folders. Similar to the categories in Outlook 2007 (no idea if this was available in Office 2003). Marking folders with colors can be really helpful, especially if you have many of them. iColorFolder comes to the rescue [2].

After you downloaded and installed iColorFolder you right click on the folder you want to color code and you will see a new menu item: Color Label (see image below).

In addition you can also install extra skins [2]. You can either select one of the options during the time of installation or later on by running the skin selector (Start -> All Programs -> iColorFolder -> Skin Selector).

Although not a total change in look and feel, you have at least some customization, a more refined look if you will.

Why did I re-install windows on my old laptop? The only reason was the quality, or lack thereof, of the graphic card driver. This laptop uses an older Intel chip for its graphics. Rather low end. Under Linux there is no decent driver that will work with it anymore. Yes, there are two versions of a driver, but only the older one will work with this laptop  resulting in banding galore. So I decided to try Windows again and I must say the graphics display is much better. Still not great, but much less banding. My guess is that the old linux driver cannot display 32bit colors although it says it does. I do not have these issues on my main machine which runs Linux. Graphics are great (using an ATI card there).

Resources

[1] Royale Theme for XP
[2] iColorFolder