How to Create Your Own Windows7 Theme

A Windows 7 theme is nothing but a collection of wallpapers, visual styles, screensaver and some windows settings which gives a unique feel to your desktop. You can change settings of some visual elements like Window border color, different windows sounds and create a new environment – in short a unique Windows 7 theme.
There are many reasons why you want to create your own Windows 7 theme. The first reason is that you may work with multiple computers and find it very difficult or distracting when there is another theme installed on the same system. You want to save time changing all the settings, colors, background wallpaper and in these situations a windows theme pack file will certainly help.
The second reason is that you may want to create something very unique which no one else has done before and would want to share this Windows 7 them with your friends or colleagues. If you have a website or blog, you can create a Windows 7 theme for your blog readers and give it away for free as well.
The advantage of using a Windows7 theme pack is that you can change the entire look by simply double clicking the themepack file. There is no need to change each and every setting over and over again.

Accumulate All the Items of The Theme You Are Going to Create

Before we move on to the steps of creating a Windows7 themepack, here are the typical elements of a Windows7 themepack which you need to know:

• Desktop icons
• Desktop wallpapers
• Windows Sounds
• Windows screensaver
• Mouse pointers
• Theme color
• Slideshow.

1. First accumulate all the elements of your theme in a new folder – here you will save all the files required by the theme to work. You can create nested folders inside your main folder to contain wallpapers, screensavers, mouse cursors and so on.



2. Find Wallpapers: Search for some cool wallpaper sites and download those wallpapers which you want to show in your theme. A quick Google Search for wallpapers will open a lot of wallpapers sites, you can also use our recommended list of trusted wallpapers sites here.
As an example – I would want to give a MAC feel to my windows desktop, hence I downloaded some MAC wallpapers and copied all of them to my custom Windows7 theme folder -> Wallpapers folder.

3. Find Screensavers: In the same way, search for some screensaver sites and download a couple of good screensavers for your new windows 7 theme. A good website for free screensavers is screensavers.com.
If you do not prefer to use any screensaver, it is perfectly all right. The themepack which will be created will then use windows default screensaver.

4. Find Unique sounds: Don’t like the sound scheme of Windows7? Go ahead and download some cool sounds which you want to use in the Windows7 theme which you are creating. You can use sounddogs.com or freesound.org to find high quality sound effects for Free. Once you have downloaded the custom sound files, drop them in the “Sounds” folder of the Windows 7 theme.
5. Cursors and Icons: Similarly you can find free mouse cursors here and some good looking icons on this website
Once all the files are in place, drop them in the respective folders – this will be handy when you want to change your theme at a later point of time or want to edit the theme from scratch.

Creating the Windows 7 Themepack

1. Right click on desktop and select “Personalize”, as shown below:



2. This will open a new window where you can change different elements of the theme. The window will look like the following:



3. Now you have to change the different elements of the custom theme which you are going to create.
First, click “Change desktop icons” on the left top of the window and choose the items whose icon you wish to change. Remember we created a new folder containing the files of our theme earlier? Now browse to the same folder and choose the respective icons, as shown below:



Make sure to select the checkbox “Allow themes to change desktop icons” and then hit “Apply” followed by “OK”
3. In the same way, click mouse pointers on the personalization window and browse to the “Cursors folder” of your Windows 7 themes folder. Next choose the cursors which you want to use in your theme, as shown below:



4. To add wallpapers to your Windows7 theme, go back to the personalization window and select “Desktop background” at the bottom of the window:



Now browse to the “Wallpapers” folder created earlier which contains all the wallpapers you have saved for the custom theme you are going to create.



Click save changes and you are done.
5. Changing the color of program windows is also fairly easy, click “Windows colors” at the bottom of the personalization window and pick the color you want to go with the custom theme.


6. The next feature is changing Windows sounds, which is available just beside the “Windows color” link at the bottom of the personalization Window. Click the “Sounds” link and this will open the following window:



First select the program events and then click the “Browse” button to select the source path of the sound file in the your Windows7 theme folder (discussed earlier).

Saving the Custom Theme

Once all this customizations are done, you have to save all the changes to a themepack file so that you can use this theme later. To do this, open the personalization window and click “Save theme” as shown below:



Next, right click the saved theme and select “Save theme for sharing”. This will open a window, now choose the file type as .themepack and save the themepack on your computer.




That’s it. You have just created a brand new windows7 theme and it’s ready to be used on any computer. To share this theme, all you have to do is send the themepack file to anyone and your friends would be able to use the same theme on their computers. If you want to change the theme again, you can follow the exact same steps as mentioned earlier, because you have the source files that are used in the custom theme you have built.
This tutorial works for all the editions of Windows7 e.g Home premium, professional, ultimate and enterprise.
Have you created your own personalized windows7 theme ? Please share your thoughts in the comments section..

EnjOy..:)
MamoOn..