
You will also notice that they are no changes in the taskbar, as this needs another tweak. If you scroll down, you will be able to view your newly installed XP themes. Once that is done, you can open up the Personalisation dialog as usual: Right-click on a blank area of the desktop and select Personalise. If you don’t already have a program that can extract RAR archives, 7-Zip will help you to do the job. The themes come in a RAR archive, and you need to extract them to the %windir%\Resources\Themes\ folder (just type the path into a File Explorer address bar). Once you have installed UxStyle, go to Sagorpirbd’s DeviantArt page to get hold of some authentic looking Windows XP themes for Windows 10 - UxStyle relaxes the Windows theme signature requirements just enough to get these themes installed.

While this process is a little less involved than the Classic Shell one, but the end results is a touch more authentic, although the software you need isn’t all freeware.

UxStyleĬonversely, you can also use the theming tool UxStyle to do the job (use the Windows 10 Technical Preview version). Right click the Start menu button to open Classic Start Menu Settings. The archive contains the taskbar texture, the wallpaper and the Start button to be used with Classic Shell. Once those Windows tweaks are taken care of, then download the Classic Shell XP Suite or Classic Shell Windows 7 suite from Winaero and extract all its files to any folder you like. Scroll down and ensure that Show colour on title bar is enabled. Toggle the Use small taskbar buttons switch to ‘On’, then click Colours and choose blue that is to the extreme left on the third row down.

Install the program on your Windows 10 machine and then right-click on the taskbar and select Settings. It also adds some productivity improvements, adding various tweaks to File Explorer and the Start menu. The user can change the taskbar text color, change the color to make it different from the title bar color, change its transparency or set a background image or texture for the Windows taskbar.
