Did you miss the vintage Windows XP screen? Want to travel back to 2010 and have your computer look like Windows 7?
Fortunately for you, there are many tools that can help you customize Microsoft's operating system to match your own taste. So we present you with a few of them:
Let's start with "Classic Shell," which lets you change the Windows 10 taskbar to look like Windows XP or 7. You can change the color of the text on the taskbar to be different from the original color of the bar, change its transparency, or set a background image for the Windows taskbar. It also adds some productivity improvements, adding various tweaks to File Explorer and the Start menu.
Install the program for Windows 10 and then right‑click the taskbar and select Settings. Toggle the use of small buttons on the taskbar by turning it to «On», then click the Colors option and select the blue that is at the left edge, in the third row down. Scroll down and make sure that Show color on the title bar is enabled.
Once these Windows tweaks are done, then download the Classic Shell XP Suite or Classic Shell Windows 7 from Winaero. The file includes the taskbar, the Start button and the wallpaper used with Classic Shell. Right-click the Start menu button to open the Classic Start Menu Settings.
Additionally, you can also use the UxStyle tool to achieve the same result. While this process is less interactive than Classic Shell, the final result is slightly more authentic, although the software used is not entirely free.
After you have installed UxStyle, go to the DeviantArt Sagorpirbd page to obtain some authentic Windows XP themes for Windows 10 – UxStyle relaxes the Windows theme signature requirements enough to install these themes. The themes come in a RAR file and you must extract them from the % windir% \\ Resources \\ Themes \\ folder (just type the path into an address bar line in Explorer). If you do not already have a program that can extract RAR files, 7‑Zip will help you get the job done.
Once that's done, you can open the Personalization dialog box as usual: Right-click on an empty area of the desktop and select Personalize. Select Themes and then Settings .
You will notice that there are no changes in the taskbar, as this requires another tweak. The helper StartIsBack and a separate Start menu and taskbar set are needed. In this case, you should copy the files from your RAR to the folder C: \ Users \\ AppData \ Local \ StartIsBack \ Orbs (for the orbs) and C: \ Users \\ AppData \ Local \ StartIsBack \ Styles (for the styles), at which point StartIsBack should be able to display them.
Right-click the Start menu button, select Properties and the StartIsBack options panel will appear. You can complete the conversion to XP in the Appearance tab. Please note that the program is free for only 30 days, after which you will need to subscribe for $ US2.99 ($ 4).
