Tired of a boring blue background? Change your Windows XP Theme.

tagged: Background, Theme, Windows XP

Tired of a boring blue background? Change your Windows XP Theme.

Do you want to make your Windows XP computer a bit more personalized? In this guide, we’ll show you how to change the colors of your task bar and more!

Go from this...

To this!

Step 1: Right-click on a free portion of your desktop, and click “Properties”. From the window that comes up, you’ll be able to change all sorts of display settings. For now, we’re going to focus on aesthetics.

Click on "Properties"

Step 2: Select the “Appearance” tab in the window that comes up. Here, you’ll see a few drop-down boxes.

Click on the tab labeled "Appearance".

The first is “Windows and Buttons”, and it has two options, Windows Classic and Windows XP. The style you choose here dictates the overall theme of your computer. Windows Classic makes your computer look similar Windows 2000 and Windows 98. Windows XP makes your computer look like, well, Windows XP. Windows XP is probably what you’re currently using, and what you’re probably used to. For this guide, let’s keep using the Windows XP theme.

The next option is the Color Scheme, which is the primary target of this guide. Here you can choose from Default (blue), Silver, and Olive Green. Whichever one you choose is up to you.

Chose your preferred theme.

The third option offered is the Font Size, which is something we’ll talk about in another guide.

Step 3: Now that we have a theme selected, we can pick a custom background. Still in the Display Properties Window, click on the Desktop tab. In this section, we can apply a single color as our background, pick a preloaded background from Windows, or even pick a custom photo!

From the Desktop tab, pick your background and color.

To apply a basic color, scroll all the way up in the Background menu, and click “none”. Then, select your color from the “Color” box in the lower right hand corner.

To pick a preloaded background from Windows, simply pick one from the Background menu. As you click on each one, a small preview will appear.

If you really want to customize your background and want to select your own photo, click the Browse button, and select your own picture. (Note: Larger images are better; most pictures taken on a newer digital camera should be big enough.)

If you chose to apply a picture as your background, click on the Position drop-down menu. From this menu, select the option you like best. For the preloaded backgrounds and most larger custom backgrounds, “stretch” will work best. For smaller custom backgrounds, select “center” (that way the image won’t come out distorted or fuzzy). If you picked “center”, be sure to pick a color from the color menu.

Step 4: Now that we have picked out all of these custom settings, it’s time to make sure they stay. Click the “OK” button at the bottom of the Display Properties Window.