A Nice Clean Desk

September 20, 2005

So I spent several hours tidying up my start menu, desktop, quick launch, uninstalling crap, the general housework you can never be bothered to do.

Then I thought… hmm, I want a new theme for windows. I headed to the place I normally go for such things - ThemeXP.org. Its here I find that nearly every single theme is now "wrapped" as they call it. Basically this is an euphemism for "they filled it with adware/spyware/IE Toolbars". Now we really don’t want that do we.

So what did I do? I googled for a way to bypass installing their crap along with the themes. And it wasn’t easy but here it is.

• Save the .exe file to a folder on your hard drive, for example C:\themes
• Open a command prompt to this same folder. You may need to cd \themes
• run the command filename.exe /x temp. This will extract all the files from the installer into a subfolder named temp
• Go to C:\themes\temp\, where you will see a handful of files. The one you want is %EXENAME%
• Rename this to mytheme.rar and move it to where ever you want to keep it.
• Delete all the other files. Do NOT run any of these as they will install adware/spyware/toolbars on your computer

Now, you can extract the rar file to your resources\themes directory, and provided your uxtheme.dll has been patched, you can switch to that theme using Display Properties in control panel.

Filed under: Desktop |