A buddy on another forum posted some of pics of his desktop, and I think they are nothing short of amazing! He said he's running XP with the classic theme yet he's managed to totally give it a smooth and sophisticated look. He also isn't using a Visual Style or any 3rd party apps to acheive this.








I know how he hacked explorer.exe to delete some of the entries from his Start menu, but that's about it.

Some of the neato highlights of his hack-job are the color changes to the interface (that light gray-blue), the lack of borders around the Start menu and Notification area, and the font change (font is called Calibri, btw).

Does anyone know how he did all this? He won't tell anyone, but I like the change so much. Minimalism FTW!

It looks like the HmmXP theme http://www.ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=546

Thats my vote 2.

It's just a color theme and either tclock or efective desktop running. So I think he lied about not using any 3rd party appz.

BTW: That soft bevel "effect" on windows and buttons is as old as Windows itself...

Yeah, it definitely looks like HmmXP but he doesn't use Visual Styles, I know that for a fact. He told me he had changed the start menu button, maybe he did do it with Tclock2 or Lclock. Isn't it possible to hack that in Explorer.exe?

I still don't know how he changed the bevel on the bars and button, though. :/

The trick is to specify similar (but not the same) colors for button shadows and button face. It works somewhat better when this two colors are rather light.

If you want extra "softness" you can set a higher value for Dark shadows too.

How is this done? I've looked through the Advanced portion of the Appearance tab and found no option to change the "shading" and "highlighting" of the 3D windows. I still don't know how he removed the bevel on indented portions of the theme (ie: the notification area)

Well those items are not in the appearance tab. If you don't wan't to use any 3rd party appz then you must change them through regedit ( "hkey_current_user / control panel / colors" ). That way is very easy but a little tedious so i'd recommend 3DCC.

The flat systray effect can't be done without extra software. Try Tclock or Effective Desktop (discontinued but great IMHO)

imagesocket blows...

Can anybody upload the images somewhere else?

What's wrong with our service, I would love to hear your feedback?