The story of how I find cool stuff, inevitably break said cool stuff, and (hopefully) end up fixing whatever I did

So you wanna be cool and have an awesome desktop for all of your friends?  You could just do the easy thing and install linux….but if not and you are just all nice and cozy with windows, I will cave and give you an easy way to do that.

Windows won’t let you just download any theme you want as is so you need a little patcher program to help yourself along.  I you have any service pack below Service Pack 3, then use this little guy here.  If you are the security guru and went ahead and installed Service Pack 3 then use this sucker.

Download whichever file applies to you and save it to a place that is easy to find.  Once this file downloads, unzip it with your favorite unzipper program.  Unzipping is built right into windows so if you’re lost just double click on the file you just downloaded and a wizard will pop up to ease your befuddlement.  (I really recommend Unrar by the way, but that is just my opinion).  Now find yourunzipped file and double click on it, a button should pop up with some info, you can read through if you want, and then hit the “Patch” button and wait a few.  There will be a window that pops up about “Windows File Protection” that will most likely freak most of you out, but its ok b/c I’m telling you to calm down and just hit cancel and everything will be alright.  It will then ask you, “Are you sure you want to keep these unrecognized files versions” and you will now answer yes to this question.  Another window will then pop up, prompting you to restart so go ahead and save everything and close out and then hit ok to reboot.

Now that you are back from rebooting and managed to locate this page again, you are ready to install some brand spankin’ new custom XP themes to reall show your friends how awesome you are.  I can recommend two good sites for XP themes,  Wincustomize.org and Customize.org. (I can’t imagine that these are the only two sites but seeing as how I don’t use windows very much anymore I don’t go around looking for themes for it, please feel free to recommend better ones in the comments.)  Peruse these sites and locate a theme which you wish to install and then come back here once you have located one or two or seven.  Once you have found the themes you like, download them to a place that is easily accessible but one that you won’t readily delete a couple months down the road b/c you don’t remember what it is.  Now since these files are most likely located in a zip file, go ahead and unzip them with your favorite program into that special folder you have. Now open that folder and there should be a bunch of files in there that you have no idea what they are, just find the one that ends in .msstyles and double click on it.  A window will pop up that looks something similar (but not exactly the same) as this

.

Just hit ok, and your new theme will be installed in a jiffy.  If you decide you hate all your new themes and just wanna go back to plain old boring windows default, then just right click on your desktop, hit properties and click the appearance tab that is second from the left at the top of that window.  If you have any questions you can post them here or email me arollyson@gmail.com .

Unfortunately for you your desktop with windows will never be as awesome as this….